Warren Beatty (2016)
Warren Beatty has experienced some unhappy evenings at the Academy Awards. In 1968, Bonnie and Clyde won fewer awards than it deserved (two from ten nominations). Heaven Can Wait fared no better in 1979 (one award from nine nominations). More recently, Beatty’s wife Annette Bening should have been Best Actress for American Beauty (and maybe The Kids Are All Right too) but left the ceremony empty-handed. Beatty has received the honorary Irving Thalberg award from AMPAS and a competitive Oscar for directing Reds. Even so, the latter was another film that ended up with a smaller haul than expected (three awards from twelve nominations): in one of the Academy’s gaga moments, Reds lost out to Chariots of Fire for Best Picture. That surprise ending to the 1982 Oscars show doesn’t begin to compare, of course, with 2017’s cock-up climax – as a result of which Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway will, unfortunately, be linked forever not just with Bonnie and Clyde but also with Envelopegate.
Beatty’s latest was never going to be an awards contender although it too is set in La La Land. At ninety minutes (or less), Rules Don’t Apply might have been a slight but amusing tale of Hollywood: with a running time of more than two hours, it comes across as listless and self-indulgent – and its commercial failure is unsurprising. (The picture cost around $25m and, several months after its release in North America, has taken less than $4m.) Beatty plays Howard Hughes and the experience of watching the movie suggests a couple of parallels between the two men. Beatty isn’t on screen for the first half-hour or so: the delay not only reflects Hughes’s notorious reclusiveness but is meant to make the wait for Beatty tantalising. The film repeatedly illustrates the chasm between Hughes’s power and status, and his egocentric eccentricity. Wanted on the phone by the Eisenhower White House, Hughes is too busy to take the call: he’s preoccupied with commanding his flunkies to bulk-buy a particular flavour of ice cream for him. You feel Warren Beatty must also be a hard man to whom to say no. How else did he enlist the assistance of so many talented people in the folly of Rules Don’t Apply?
This is a made-up story with a mixture of real and invented characters though that hardly matters: Howard Hughes is such a mythical figure that the boundary between fact and fiction in his biography is exceedingly porous. (Beatty puts on the screen, as an epigraph, one of Hughes’s best-known quotes: ‘Never check an interesting fact’.) The film opens and closes in 1964; most of the action consists of an intervening flashback, five years earlier. Beatty’s scene-setting is pleasant and witty but Rules Don’t Apply takes ages to develop a narrative groove, even though it’s soon clear who, in addition to Hughes, will be the main characters. Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) works as a driver on Hughes’s staff; Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) is an aspiring actress newly arrived in Hollywood, chaperoned by her eagle-eyed mother Lucy (Annette Bening). Marla is under contract with RKO; she and Lucy live in accommodation paid for by Hughes; Frank is their chauffeur. What the two youngsters have in common, as well as liking the look of each other, is an increasing frustration that they don’t get to meet their boss. But the persisting anticipatory atmosphere of the film is more a consequence of Beatty’s storytelling than of his/Hughes’s non-appearance: successive short scenes build up in number but not in interest. The vitality level dips further when Lucy Mabrey returns home to Virginia and Annette Bening departs the scene.
Once the leading man eventually enters it, the effect is anti-climactic and no more than mildly entertaining. Howard Hughes was only in his mid- to late fifties in the years in question; Warren Beatty is a good twenty years older. (He turned eighty last month, although the film was actually shot in 2014 and early 2015.) Yet he often seems like a middle-aged actor doing a geriatric character – complete with little wheezing noises and private chuckles. His portrait of Hughes is sympathetic, perhaps sentimental and rather bland, except for a few expressive shots of his eyes. His dilapidation is cosmetic: Beatty’s Hughes could never have turned into the tramp-like figure incarnated by Jason Robards in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980). (Bo Goldman, who wrote that fine movie, shares a story credit with Beatty for Rules Don’t Apply; Beatty has sole credit for the screenplay.)
It’s an irony of the film – one that I find it hard to think intentional – that the two young leads are more impressive than the elder statesman. Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich, deft and charming to begin with, are even better as they describe Marla’s and Frank’s maturation, which has both comical and saddening aspects. At the start, their sex appeal and feelings for one another compete with religious scruples – Marla is a Baptist, Frank a Methodist. Growing up and away from religion is part of their loss of innocence. As Marla finds herself pregnant with Hughes’s child, Lily Collins loses her bloom. Frank becomes an established member of the Hughes team: the disillusion of company man life puts years and weight on Alden Ehrenreich. It’s a relief that the story ends happily for Marla and Frank, who escape from Tinseltown together (with Marla’s little boy, sired by Hughes), even though this feels more willed by Warren Beatty than convincing.
The amazing collection of people in the cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Oliver Platt, Paul Schneider, Martin Sheen and Paul Sorvino. (Steve Coogan too but I’m anxious to put distance between him and the ‘amazing collection’ umbrella.) Some of these actors appear for only a few seconds; it’s a bonus that Matthew Broderick, as one of Hughes’s longest-standing factotums, has much more screen time and the opportunity to demonstrate his genius for embodying discomfort and defeat. For someone of my film-going age, there’s nostalgia in seeing these old faces again (and several of them really are now old) – nostalgia too in the list of credits of people behind the camera: the cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel, the costume designer is Albert Wolsky, and the film looks lovely. For these reasons, it’s hard not to feel kindly towards Rules Don’t Apply, even though it amounts to so little. Apart from the original title song, the music mostly comprises variously humorous hit singles of the late 1950s and early 1960s (‘Rockin’ Robin’, ‘Take Two’). When Mahler arrives on the soundtrack – with what I still think of as the Death in Venice music – Warren Beatty seems to be announcing, rather too obviously, that he has serious things to say about age and youth. Coming out of Rules Don’t Apply, I was still in the dark as to what those things were.
21 April 2017
