Rules Don’t Apply
Dustin Chase
It’s been 16 years since Warren Beatty starred in a film, since 1998’s Bulworth that he was behind the camera. Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty for a new generation, and it’s a disappointing reintroduction. This throwback to classic Hollywood has a lot of problems in front and behind the camera, but most of its negative issues have Beatty himself to blame. Perhaps the iconic Bonnie & Clyde actor missed the Oscar winning Martin Scorsese film The Aviator that thoroughly covers Howard Hughes from childhood to insanity. Rules Don’t Apply feels like a film coming from someone who doesn’t understand modern filmmaking, and who doesn’t care that his fascination with Hughes will be a “less than” version of a superior film. It has what is simply the worst editing job of a modern movie I have ever seen.
Marla Mabrey (Collins) is a Baptist girl from Virginia hoping to make it big in Hollywood. Frank Forbes (Ehrenreich) is a driver for the young, impressionable girls coming to California seeking stardom. Both Marla and Frank work for Hollywood tycoon Howard Hughes (Beatty) who has more people on the payroll than he can manage. Frank is engaged to his high school sweetheart back in Fresno, and while forbidden to spend time with the girls he drives around, he can’t stop thinking about Marla. Both wide eyed and ambitious, trying to suppress their feelings, they both get their moment with the mentally deteriorating Hughes. As the billionaire moguls’ various investments fall apart, so do the feelings between the lovebirds.
Feels like a film coming from someone who doesn’t understand modern filmmaking.
Rules Don’t Apply (repeated over and over again; in verse, speech and song) functions like a Woody Allen movie. It just lacks the clever intelligent dialogue and structured performances of an Allen picture. What’s worse is the editing, there are four listed editors on this movie, and it’s hard to imagine any of those professionals would allow their name to be associated with something so abhorrent, abrupt and distracting. It isn’t just the rapid, nonsensical cuts, it’s the disproportion and the disruption in narrative it causes. Often in the middle of a scene, we cut to a new location and the txt for the city lasts longer than the scene itself. The editing is noticeably worse in the latter parts of the film where the story becomes a slog. The character development here is laughable, with lots of famous faces flickered on screen, then disappearing. If you didn’t know any better, you would think Beatty and Collins were performing in some Hallmark weekly special.
Why anyone would want to thrust an audience back into the world that Scorsese perfected with the events of The Aviator, is beyond me. While the opening of the film does explain the names and dates have been changed, Beatty is playing Hughes as a 79-year-old while DiCaprio played him as a 30-year-old. The scenes and set up between Beatty and a 27-year-old Collins are off-putting. Beatty doesn’t capture any of the fascination and admiration Scorsese did for Hughes, this is more like a caricature. Beatty’s performance amounts to nothing more than a narcissistic, grand stand of a former star desperately trying to be relevant again with a project that’s tired and unflattering. Alden Ehrenreich in his second film about old Hollywood this year, is the one single highlight of the film, buried beneath all the other failures.
Final Thought
A disproportionate, off putting and antiquated film that explores just how out of touch Warren Beatty is with modern cinema.