Film Review: Rules Don't Apply

Warren Beatty’s romantic comedy Rules Don’t Apply is a love letter to 1950s Hollywood under the reign of Howard Hughes – a beloved hero of Beatty. As hopeful young starlets lined up to meet him, Hughes’ investors were getting nervous about the actions of the larger-than-life actor and inventor. Hughes had always been eccentric, but was his increasingly paranoid behaviour the sign of dementia?

Beatty plays Hughes with a suitably doddery charisma, but Rules Don’t Apply is more about the characters in his orbit, like Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), a Baptist beauty queen from Virginia determined to impress the director. Her chauffeur, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), falls for Marla, but her ambition, his status, and the social and sexual mores of the time all collude to make their journey anything but smooth.

Beatty’s image of Hollywood is beautiful, as car rides through 1950s Los Angeles play out like a series of gorgeously glossy, nostalgia-tinged photographs. But plot-wise, the film desperately needs focus. Even allowing for the era’s puritanical sexual culture, Collins and Ehrenreich share no chemistry, so the central romance is a ddud. And while Hughes’ odd demands are played off as screwball shenanigans, they’re sadder than Beatty realises.

As a director, Beatty loves endless quick cuts and 10-second scenes of not-so-witty banter; it’s an attempt to capture the quickfire wit of old movies that falls sadly flat. And while stars like Annette Benning and Candice Bergen appear, they’re not given much to do. One gets the feeling that they were as awed by Beatty as he was of Hughes. Which, really, is fair enough.