Rules Don’t Apply is all style over substance

RULES Don’t Apply had all the ingredients for a charming period film about Hollywood glamour and eccentric billionaires. Shame it didn’t come together.

SUCH is the mystery that surrounds Howard Hughes that history can’t even agree on his place or date of birth.

His later reclusive years have become the stuff of legend. Refusing to be seen by anyone except those in his inner-inner circle, the tycoon would shutter himself in dark hotel rooms, eating only chocolate bars and drinking milk and rearranging tissue boxes.

Famously showy early on, the aviation pioneer and businessman was known for his affairs with impressionable actresses, as well as his numerous affairs with screen sirens including Bette Davis, Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn — all younger than him, of course.

Hughes was always an eccentric and it’s thought he suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. As such, the story of the enigmatic Hughes has been a great lure to directors.

Warren Beatty has wanted to make a movie about Hughes since he first encountered him at a hotel in 1973. Beatty was impressed by Hughes having stashed away several women in rooms around the joint. Beatty, a lothario in his own youth, was impressed, or so the story goes.

The 44-years-later result is Rules Don’t Apply — an effort that admittedly fudges many of the details, including names and dates.

From one lothario to another.

When young ingenue Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), the Apple Blossom Queen of some small town in Virginia, arrives in LA in 1964, the Hollywood studio system was pretty much done. Devout Baptist Marla and her mother (Annette Bening) are put up in a house above the Hollywood Bowl and she’s paid $400 a week as a contract player to Hughes’ studio, RKO.

Marla was promised dreams of stardom and a screen test for a mythical film but she, along with 25 other aspirants, never even get to meet Hughes, wasting their days in “acting classes”.

Marla’s driver, Frank (Alden Ehrenreich) is a young Methodist from Fresno, California with a fiancee back home. His ambitions don’t include the movies, instead he wants to leverage his job to convince Hughes to invest in a parcel of land near Mulholland to build affordable housing homes.

The rules governing all interactions between Hughes’ contract actresses and the drivers are prohibitive. Any infraction would see the driver sacked.

Naturally, Marla and Frank hit it off, and the chemistry established by doe-eyed Collins and the dynamic Ehrenreich (soon to be the young Han Solo) is sizzling. Despite being restrained by their employment and repressed by their strict Christian upbringings, the two find it hard to resist each other’s charms.

More than just another pretty face.

If Rules Don’t Apply had stayed with the young lovers’ and those actors’ compelling performances, it would’ve probably been a better and more complete film.

About halfway through, a jarring shift happens and the film becomes about Hughes’ and his increasingly erratic behaviour. And a creepy romance that’s hard to stomach. At this point, Rules Don’t Apply loses its lustre.

Beatty’s Hughes borders on caricature and his “losing it” mirrors the film’s “losing it”, both in coherence and the audience.

Beatty, who also wrote, directed and produced Rules Don’t Apply, has made a beautiful-to-look-at film making full cinematic use of its glamorous period setting.

Beatty’s staggering influence also roped in plenty of his famous friends, some in barely-speaking roles. The likes of Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Oliver Platt, Dabney Coleman, Matthew Broderick, Martin Sheen, Ed Harris and Steve Coogan all make memorable appearances.

But despite having all the ingredients for a charming film, like Hughes, Rules Don’t Apply’s soul remains elusive.

Rating: 2.5/5

Rules Don’t Apply is in cinemas from today.

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Alden Ehrenreich will soon be behind the wheel of the Millenium Falcon.

Originally published as Rules Don’t Apply is all style over substance