Beatty is amusing as Hughes, the love affair of the young'uns not so much.
Rules Don’t Apply
Grade: B
Director: Warren Beatty (Bulworth)
Screenplay: Beatty
Cast: Haley Bennett (The Girl on the Train), Ed Harris
Rating: PG-13 (Snowpiercer)
Runtime: 2 hr 6 min
by John DeSando
Rules Don’t Apply is a nostalgic look at Hollywood in the 50’s and early 60’s when Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) was still making munitions and planes and rounding up starlets. Beatty’s performance may be the best of his career, playing eccentric, playful, and manipulative Hughes at the same time that he was isolating himself from the world.
I seem to have emphasized the wrong part of this dramedy, for the love affair between one of those starlets, Marla (Lily Collins), and one of Hughes’s drivers, Frank (Erin Ehrenreich) is the center of the action. Nothing could be better to encourage their romance than for Hughes to forbid connections between his employees and his starlets.
Because she looks like Elizabeth Taylor and he like Montgomery Clift, sparks are bound to fly. Appropriately, the labyrinthine lives of those early Hollywood players are the juicy stuff that writer-director Beatty gets right. He catches the innocent passion of an industry climbing to the stars while industrialists and bankers are partnering for the also emerging airlines.
It’s heady stuff, ambition and love, and who better than Warren Beatty, an icon of Hollywood glamour in mid-century? Although Hughes is the natural center of energy in any film about him, the young couple is a more believable representation of the ambition that still rules Hollywood and the world, as business intrudes on the purity of the young.
However, the young prove to be resilient with a greater promise than the old deal makers. In fact, for those daring to be themselves, like the young couple, “the rules don’t apply.”
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
