Rules Don't Apply (2016)

 

Director: Warren Beatty

Screenplay: Warren Beatty

Cast: Warren Beatty as Howard Hughes; Lily Collins as Marla Mabrey; Alden Ehrenreich as Frank Forbes; Annette Bening as Lucy Mabrey; Matthew Broderick as Levar Mathis; Alec Baldwin as Robert Maheu; Haley Bennett as Mamie Murphy; Candice Bergen as Nadine Henly; Dabney Coleman as Raymond Holliday

Ephemeral Waves

 

I want banana-nut ice cream!

For a few of us, we did not even get a film eighteen years in the making, the legendary Hollywood actor Warren Betty directing his first film since Bulworth (1998), That was a production which, about a older white politician who goes through a mental breakdown and ends up appropriating rap rhyme and what he thinks of the language of African Americans, is both a film which sticks in some still salient points, more so in how politicians who are considered unpredictable and breaking rules compel people to them, but alongside being a film many would consider un-PC, and also mad as a box of frogs. This is a very different  20th Century Fox release, Rules Don't Apply still idiosyncratic to have been released in the 2010s, but not with Warren Beatty in a beanie hat, in his older age, rapping badly in a film which contrasted Ennio Morricone in a soundtrack alongside Cypress Hill.

The fact that Beatty, directing and writing the script for this film, can be willing to play the central figure, of real life individual Howard Hughes, as a figure half between alert and a buffoon shows a willingness in his own terms to be ridiculous onscreen. In his own small directorial career, Beatty really has not been conventional, for between Reds (1981), an elaborate and sympathetic take on the communist revolution, to Dick Tracey (1990), a Disney produced adaptation of the classic newspaper comic character which even replicates the newspaper colour restrictions and the villains' distorted features, all the films fascinating and in this case because of the man he is. Beatty is not an actor we really have nowadays in the newer generations, for good and for bad, a figure very blunt in his image, blunt to his political beliefs, and also a huge and morally complicated aspect of his years of being a ladies' man, including when he was even dating Madonna, significantly younger than him, around Dick Tracey and being tugged along in her own career of being a rebel.

As a result, he's as much fascinating as a figure to scrutinise and his work is worthy to dissect, both because it is all well made but also because some unintentionally slip to bleed the sides. Even Dick Tracey, which is the weakest of the films in being merely a fun comic film, has a stranger edge when you realise it marked him moving from Madonna, who plays the femme fatale in that film seducing his wholesome two-toned detective lead, and his marriage to Annette Bening when he settled down, marked in that film by his real love interest and a child sidekick. Bulworth, in its messy and frankly eyebrow raising attempts of a story of a former hippy democrat trying to get down with disenfranchised black Americans, feels like a film of an older middle aged Democrat in Beatty himself effectively making a weird midlife crisis film, including the fact a young Halle Berry is the love interest from another community he eventually wins over, that a moral quandary to look into itself.

Rules Don't Apply never had a British cinema release, not even a Blu-Ray or DVD release, and by 2019 21st Century Fox was swallowed up by Disney, which leaves a film like this one lost in a further limbo as an unsuccessful product. Streaming has helped with this issue, but this would have been one of those major studio releases in the old days, i.e. the 2000s, which you may hear of through media (like film podcasts from the United States) only to never see. The film itself follows the tale of Howard Hughes - the legendary American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director, and philanthropist, ​who was tackled by Martin Scorsese in The Aviator (2004), and is a figure whose biography here is barely covered, one whose complicated personality is both fascinating and difficult, a figure you could devote a compelling tome or two towards. Beatty decided to make this film and cast himself is the curious touch, whether it says of him wishing to reflect himself as an old figure of the past to a character here at his downfalls, the world we enter of  Hughes that of a deeply problematic real man, in his attitudes and behaviours, but also a fascinatingly odd one.

This ignores his past as a figure who was also a Casanova like Beatty with women, including legendary actresses like Katherine Hepburn, a man who broke aviation records and nearly died in planes many times. It does briefly touch on his involvement in cinema, at the time he was head of RKO Pictures, though we miss a legacy of a man, wishing to make a better film than Wings (1927), nearly ruined himself by sinking his fortunes into a film called Hell's Angels (1930), and nearly kill himself participating in one of the real airplane stunts, and set on the period that The Simpsons once parodied and even Orson Welles, in F For Fake (1973), talked of when discussing a fake "autobiography" from Hughes, the period of self isolation where his mental health was at question and his obsession-compulsive disorder (and fear of germs) are shown in this film's version to have gotten even severe. It is a fascinating film if you consider, entirely around fictional figures in their own narratives, imagining the strange and tragic mindscape of Hughes. The man is not defendable at all for a lot of his actions, political and in attitude, in his life at all, but he is a one-off, too rare to live and too weird to die only with the advantage few Hunter S. Thompson figures had that Hughes, a billionaire born into fortune, had the money that allowed his compulsions to breed.

The Hughes, in the prologue here in Rules Don't Apply, is set up eventually locking himself away entirely, the set-up where a biography on Hughes claims he was mentally incompetent to run his businesses, including working with the US military, a media event waiting for him to call them to prove his mental competency. Here, Hughes as played by Beatty is clearly going through dementia or a form of mental clouding which makes him an unpredictable figure, and whatever you think of the film, indulgent or otherwise, Beatty choose a role which he succeeds in perfectly. Aspects are based on Hughes the real figure, eccentric but also unsavoury. He was as obsessed with brassieres and their mechanics the same way as he was with airplanes, his only other known directorial work The Outlaw (1943), a western, most known because he was obsessed with creating a specialised bra for his lead Jane Russell to try to show as much of her bust as he could get away with. Beatty plays him as a doddering and tragic figure that yet has his problematic aspects, that he was a womaniser which here comes in his contracting of young women at RKO Studios but only for control and the possibility of sex.

One fictional figure placed into this is Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), a very religious young woman who comes to Hollywood under this contract and starts to bond with another fictional character in this 1950s set film, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), a driver under Hughes' contracts. The film is more their tale - a romance in the classical sense that is divided by an incident between Maria and Hughes, a one night stand drunk, and Frank effectively selling his soul for a chance of prospects. However, Hughes is the chaotic figure who causes sismic influences on those around him, who wants to buy up the last gallons of an ice cream brand he is obsessed with, only to suddenly not want it with all the attention span of a fish, and likewise move people around in his employ immediately with additional father issues and moments of mental breakdown. The exasperated assistants around him, including Matthew Broderick the cynical and scuzzy Levar Mathis, and Alec Baldwin as Robert Maheu, who never sees Hughes but has to broker deals like buying an entire Las Vegas hotel from mafia, have to dance around Hughes with Frank becomes one such figure who takes a chance to succeed within this maelstrom even if it costs him his compassion.

It is a fascinating film, one I liked immensely as a curious hodgepodge, but it is one that I am not surprised tanked at the box office. Its mood, including the happy ending, is almost syrupy, the budget to recreate late fifties to early sixties Americana, including abrupt cameos by the likes of Steve Coogan as a pilot unfortunately in a plane Hughes is flying, not meaning that this is not the target type of film to have sold to people in the 2010s. It is a film which is messy, trying to unravel whether Beatty wanted to have just a romantic narrative, in both senses of the word, or a more complicated film with themes. A film which dances between the sexual anxiety of two young Christians, one already engaged and leading to a destroyed glass table, and poking at the past in its greater complexity, the old era of Hollywood Howard Hughes became a legend within dying out in the late fifties, which only really rears its head in the score veering between fifties pop. The scenes with Hughes when he finally appears are also played for laughs, be it suddenly having a saxophone, being a billionaire who prefers TV dinners, or bumbling between lucidity in running a variety of businesses (cinema, aviation, military contracts) and trying to avoid having a psychoanalysis test that may make him deemed mentally unacceptable to run them. Yet, with scenes where he breaks down in tears, the film is forcing the viewer, even if they find the figure presented here completely unwholesome, to think of a titan slowly falling into himself.

It is compelling and well made, and undeniably in its own unconventional way, it won me over, though in terms of unconventionality, it is more that whilst structurally the film is linear, told barring a jump back in time, the story's tone is a lot more difficult in terms of where a viewer should follow. Obviously Marla is the figure of greater sympathy for, but it is notably the challenge for Beatty himself, as an older statesman from the New Hollywood era, to tackle a character and the real man in Howard Hughes here who is a pastiche in many ways but, reflecting the real figure, is a very difficult one as with the real man to deal with. The title is in reference to a song Marla composes, of figures like Hughes where the standard rules do not apply, which could be difficult to defend, as in truth a lot of the real Hughes' behaviour is not defendable.

It is a film which, befitting an actor who came into his clout during the sixties and seventies, where very idiosyncratic films came to be, Warren Beatty made a film which, despite an ending and a progression to it closer to the studio system films Hughes himself was involved with, Rules Don't Apply gets to its finale with a lot of tangents and a lot of aspects to chew on. It revolves on a figure in real life and exaggerated in this film who is idiosyncratic, but a figure you would more than certainly have had cancelled as that term became popular in the 2010s. Hughes even without this at this point has an eccentricity as well which, by the point here where both the real and fictional Hughes was concerning due to his mental health and his body breaking down in pain due to all the aviation crash injuries he sustained, is tragic even if you find the figure a hateful person. It is a thin line, whether Warren Beatty would lionise someone like Hughes, where the idea of rules not applying could be used to apply to someone like the director-writer himself, a figure out of a different era whose sway in Hollywood was powerful too. If the film was more easily available, still worthy to watch, this puzzle of unpicking the movie in both its virtues and what it says of its creator could take time. Again, it is not a surprise in the damndest this film was not a success, but those factors which would prevent it from becoming a hit are actually among the many why I really gained a great deal of admiration for it and a fascination in Beatty as a filmmaker entirely.