Rules Don't Apply (2016)

Rules Don't Apply is Warren Beatty's first film role since Town & Country in 2001, and the first feature film he's directed since Bulworth in 1998. Once one of Hollywood's biggest stars and a noted playboy, Beatty might now be principally noted for his left wing politics (and the fact that he's married to Annette Bening) but Rules Don't Apply isn't much of a political movie, instead it is to my reading the kind of movie you make when you want to make one last movie.

The prospect of playing Howard Hughes has got to have been something that had been percolating in Beatty's mind for some time, he co-wrote the story on which this movie is based and adapted it into a screenplay. Beatty seems to be having a ball playing the part which seems like a mixture of Joe Biden and Garry Shandling getting stoned. While Hughes is a major player in the story its not principally about him, instead its a rather old fashioned romance between Hughes employee Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) and young starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins). The two meet when Forbes is assigned to be Mabrey's driver when she first comes to Hollywood in the late 1950's, right around the same time Beatty first came there in real life. The two leads have a surprisingly strong chemistry together, and while there is the request misunderstandings inherent to this type of picture, it's played with a nice old fashioned subtlety and class which is refreshing at the same time its being nostalgic.

Beatty loads the film with big names in small parts, including Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Steve Coogan, Oliver Platt, Paul Sorvino, Martin Sheen and of course Annette Bening. The film is very lose with the real Howard Hughes time line, moving the whole Clifford Irving fake memories affair up about eight years and having him still signing starlets in 1959, two years after he started selling RKO for parts. This is a pleasurable eccentric meander of a film, the kind we don't get enough of and a vanity project in the best sense of the term. ***1/2