Rules Don't Apply. (12A.)
Directed by Warren Beatty.
Starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Broderick, Annette Bening and Candice Bergen. 127 mins.
This was initially due to be released in January but after it became clear that it wasn't going to be nominated for any awards and nobody was much interested in seeing Warren Beatty playing the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes it began a gradual slide down the release schedule. It's chief issue seems to be that almost nobody under 40 knows who Beatty was, and few over 40 care. By cruel irony, before being shunted back to the post Easter wilderness, Rules had been scheduled to come out in Britain the Friday after the Oscars, when absolutely everybody knew who Warren Beatty was. How appropriate then that his latest (probably last) film is a portrait of a man who seemed to be at the very heart of American life, to be pulling all the strings, only to eventually realise that it had all passed him by.
While contemporaries like Newman, McQueen and Redford have retained some presence in the public cultural consciousness (and Redford only because he's still alive and made some films with Newman) Beatty's achievement and career seem nebulous. They probably recall Bonnie and Clyde and that he thought this song was about him, and perhaps Dick Tracy and Ishtar stir some recognition but who now remembers Reds, Heaven Can Wait, Shampoo now?
Beatty has been cogitating on a Howard Hughes film since the early 70s and the parallels between them are obvious: they were both incredibly smart womanisers who dabbled in many different fields; master manipulators who kept the world at arm's length who became reclusive in later life and ended up frittering away most of the great gifts they were born with. The mystery is not why he would make a film about Howard Hughes, but why he would make this one.
Rules Don't Apply is a highly fictionalised version covering the period when he started to withdraw from public life (late 50s to 1964), seen through the experiences of his driver (Ehrenreich, soon to be very well known as young Han Solo) and one of the many young starlets (Collins) he had under contract and installed in bungalows around the Hollywood hills.
Beatty is notorious as a man who is impossible to pin down, who never gives you a straight answer, and though his film toys with various notions of what it might be – romantic comedy, farce, elegiac drama, tragedy – it never quite finds one to its liking. The depth of its failure is that the music score has to keep firing bursts of Mahler at the soundtrack in the desperate hope that it might persuade audiences to feel something here.
Beatty hasn't been seen on screen for 16 years and hasn't directed a film for two decades: Bulworth, a savage political satire, but a shambolic, almost incoherent piece of film making. This latest film also looks like some put upon editor had to work overtime trying to bring some order to it. What really strikes you is how little money Beatty seems to have had to spend on it. While Scorsese got to throw money at his Hughes film The Aviator, this film takes place in unprepossessing interiors while many of the exteriors look like they've been shot in front of period postcards. Rather than a study of a dotty old rich man whose foolish whims are indulged by his fawning staff, it looks like it was made by a dotty old rich man whose fawning staff made sure that at least he didn't waste too much of their potential inheritance on his folly. For a film about a billionaire, it looks a bit shabby.
The cast though are agreeable enough, from the young leads to the various cameos - Alec Baldwin, Steve Coogan, Ed Harris, Oliver Platt and Martin Sheen. Beatty makes Hughes a mirror of himself, a vehicle for his own eccentricities. Bizarrely, at times his facial expressions make him resemble a flesh faced version of Jack Nicholson's Joker. The two performers (both now 80) though are very different: while Nicholson is always so full of energy he reaches out of the screen at you, Beatty is so reticent, so introspected he seems to be waiting for you to come to him. This presumptuous coyness is hard to take, especially when the film has so little to offer.
The script was written with Bo Goldman, who previously wrote Melvin and Howard, another film about Hughes. That film was wrapped around the folk tale of a man picking up a stranger in the desert who claimed to be Hughes, and then left part of his fortune to him in a will. Rules seems to be trying to echo that film's view of Hughes as some spectral father figure that hovered above American culture, but ultimately reneged on his responsibilities. Objectively the Hughes of this film is a cold manipulator who has a negative impact on any life he touches but Beatty refuses to play him(self) as such. His Hughes is just an old pussycat.
Directed by Warren Beatty.
Starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Broderick, Annette Bening and Candice Bergen. 127 mins.
This was initially due to be released in January but after it became clear that it wasn't going to be nominated for any awards and nobody was much interested in seeing Warren Beatty playing the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes it began a gradual slide down the release schedule. It's chief issue seems to be that almost nobody under 40 knows who Beatty was, and few over 40 care. By cruel irony, before being shunted back to the post Easter wilderness, Rules had been scheduled to come out in Britain the Friday after the Oscars, when absolutely everybody knew who Warren Beatty was. How appropriate then that his latest (probably last) film is a portrait of a man who seemed to be at the very heart of American life, to be pulling all the strings, only to eventually realise that it had all passed him by.
While contemporaries like Newman, McQueen and Redford have retained some presence in the public cultural consciousness (and Redford only because he's still alive and made some films with Newman) Beatty's achievement and career seem nebulous. They probably recall Bonnie and Clyde and that he thought this song was about him, and perhaps Dick Tracy and Ishtar stir some recognition but who now remembers Reds, Heaven Can Wait, Shampoo now?
Beatty has been cogitating on a Howard Hughes film since the early 70s and the parallels between them are obvious: they were both incredibly smart womanisers who dabbled in many different fields; master manipulators who kept the world at arm's length who became reclusive in later life and ended up frittering away most of the great gifts they were born with. The mystery is not why he would make a film about Howard Hughes, but why he would make this one.
Rules Don't Apply is a highly fictionalised version covering the period when he started to withdraw from public life (late 50s to 1964), seen through the experiences of his driver (Ehrenreich, soon to be very well known as young Han Solo) and one of the many young starlets (Collins) he had under contract and installed in bungalows around the Hollywood hills.
Beatty is notorious as a man who is impossible to pin down, who never gives you a straight answer, and though his film toys with various notions of what it might be – romantic comedy, farce, elegiac drama, tragedy – it never quite finds one to its liking. The depth of its failure is that the music score has to keep firing bursts of Mahler at the soundtrack in the desperate hope that it might persuade audiences to feel something here.
Beatty hasn't been seen on screen for 16 years and hasn't directed a film for two decades: Bulworth, a savage political satire, but a shambolic, almost incoherent piece of film making. This latest film also looks like some put upon editor had to work overtime trying to bring some order to it. What really strikes you is how little money Beatty seems to have had to spend on it. While Scorsese got to throw money at his Hughes film The Aviator, this film takes place in unprepossessing interiors while many of the exteriors look like they've been shot in front of period postcards. Rather than a study of a dotty old rich man whose foolish whims are indulged by his fawning staff, it looks like it was made by a dotty old rich man whose fawning staff made sure that at least he didn't waste too much of their potential inheritance on his folly. For a film about a billionaire, it looks a bit shabby.
The cast though are agreeable enough, from the young leads to the various cameos - Alec Baldwin, Steve Coogan, Ed Harris, Oliver Platt and Martin Sheen. Beatty makes Hughes a mirror of himself, a vehicle for his own eccentricities. Bizarrely, at times his facial expressions make him resemble a flesh faced version of Jack Nicholson's Joker. The two performers (both now 80) though are very different: while Nicholson is always so full of energy he reaches out of the screen at you, Beatty is so reticent, so introspected he seems to be waiting for you to come to him. This presumptuous coyness is hard to take, especially when the film has so little to offer.
The script was written with Bo Goldman, who previously wrote Melvin and Howard, another film about Hughes. That film was wrapped around the folk tale of a man picking up a stranger in the desert who claimed to be Hughes, and then left part of his fortune to him in a will. Rules seems to be trying to echo that film's view of Hughes as some spectral father figure that hovered above American culture, but ultimately reneged on his responsibilities. Objectively the Hughes of this film is a cold manipulator who has a negative impact on any life he touches but Beatty refuses to play him(self) as such. His Hughes is just an old pussycat.
