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USA 2016
Directed by
Warren Beatty
127 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Rules Don't Apply

Synopsis: The story of an aspiring actress Marla Mabry (Lily Collins), her ambitious young driver, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), and their boss, eccentric billionaire,Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty).

Warren Beatty may not have the level of eccentricity of his character here, the legendary Howard Hughes, but as we have seen with Bulworth (1998) and Bugsy (1991) whatever hat he is wearing, he brings a quietly absurdist sensibility to his projects that leaves them at once charmingly idiosyncratic and slightly wide of the mark. The result here is that Rules Don’t Apply is a meticulously production about an genuinely off-beat character that seems to go out of its way to avoid engaging with him.

Whether this is some strategy by Beatty with the assistance of his cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel, to keep the now 80-year old star, co-writer, director and co-producer as far as possible from the scrutiny of the camera or whether is it meant to suggest their Hughes’s legendary status, it is quite a while before Beatty actually appears on screen and when he does, it is in barely lit rooms his face mostly in shadow. There are only a few scenes in which Beatty appears in what one would consider to be conventional lighting.

The corollary to this is that much of the film is given over to the secondary aspects of evoking the early ‘60s (including the impressive  use of archival footage which I assume has been digitally enhanced to fit seamlessly with the main film) whilst the central Hughes story is supplemented by a sub-plot concerning the burgeoning romance between Marla and Frank.  

Beatty clearly wants us to have fun and to this purpose we get Jeannine Oppewall‘s fabulous retro production design and a regular peppering of comedic moments often delivered as cameos by, aside from Mrs Beatty, Annette Bening as Marla’s disapproving  mother, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, Oliver Platt and Steve Coogan. Matthew Broderick makes a somewhat more prominent appearance as Hughes’s right-hand man (the film’s funniest moment is a confrontation between him and Hughes).  The romantic aspect is less engaging, both Collins and Ehrenreich (who looks like a non-peroxided Billy Idol) too callow, their romance too under-developed to be really engaging.  Another oddity is the prominent use Beatty makes of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp.  Clearly  he had in mind Visconti’s use of it in Death In Venice (1971) but here he appears to trying to invert its elegiac melancholy and it doesn’t work.

Although its credentials are mainstream Rules Don't Apply is a little too wacky, even perverse, to attract big audiences.  But if you know and like Beatty’s work or find some appeal in wilful artistry it is a film worth checking out.

 

 

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