Rules Don't Apply : One of the best moviesI have seen

"I don't mean to be negative, but are me living in Nicaragua now?"

This is a question posed by Howard Hughes' drivers (Levar Mathis played by Matthew Broderick and Frank Forbes) and eventual co-keepers after they are rushed to Nicaragua on a whim, and to avoid possible business catastrophe, by Mr. Hughes (played by Warren Beatty). The question gets a big laugh in a film that has many big laughs.

Howard Hughes, reporters say in the opening of the film, is an American hero and inventor. Much of the film takes place in the late 1950's, a much less cynical time when we saw the good in these types of mavericks without looking for the warts.

Marla Mabrey (lily Collins) is sent to Hollywood by Mr. Hughes. She is a pageant winner with high hopes and moral ideals (a devout Baptist) and a belief that Mr. Hughes is a gentleman. Mr. Hughes has a stable of women he brought to Hollywood for screen test.

This is a great comedy of misunderstanding. The first meet up between Hughes and Mabrey sees Marla prattle on about how grateful she is as Hughes eats a TV dinner,completely ignoring her, then (hilariously) picks up a saxophone and starts playing.

When Hughes meets Frank Forbes (Alden Ehenreich) for the first time, Forbes tries to talk Hughes into real estate as Hughes goes on about venereal disease. These confusions end up showing how much interest and slack people are willing to give a billionaire while they reside in his orbit.

Mr. Beatty has said that the film is about sexual mores of the 50s. That plays into it a bit and informs Frank and Marla's behavior as they meet and fall for each other and have complications from back home and in Hollywood. The biggest complication though is Hughes.

The film covers five years in the life of Mr. Hughes (though the events that take place, Hughes in Hollywood, the plane crash and the Clifford Irving scam, actually cover almost two decades). Many historical hallmarks take place. This is a frenzied film. The editing is quite unique, many scenes are often quick, bringing in just the necessary information to move to the next part. It is a marvel. It does lead to confusion a few times though. How much time passed between the first meet up with Forbes to the plane crash? Is Marla really waiting so long for the screen test that she starts to feel aged? Tiny quibbles.

Mr. Hughes casts a giant shadow. And some of Beatty's scenes have great poignantcy and drama. He is a paranoid (records everything) and could lose everything as he owns as his mind erodes. He is obsessed with legacy. First, he is daddy-obsessed because he believes, in a very telling scene, that DNA allows your father to still be alive in you.

Marla writes a song for Frank based on a kind comment he had made to her.

One day I told my friend I was terribly blue.
Was it far too late to do what I dreamed I could do?
He thought for a moment, then he answered.
He said, The rules dont apply to you.
He said it very simply, and quietly too.
But as if there wasnt any doubt at all that he knew.
He gave me a gift that I would treasure.
He said, The rules dont apply to you.
In the movies we see, in the shows on TV,
And in anthems passionately sung,
Theres a message that youve got to keep believing in yourself,
But they generally mean, if youre young.
It it written in the air, as it seems to be,
That we havent long at all to find our destiny?
Ill always remember to be grateful
That the rules dont apply to me.
I wouldnt like.
The rules dont apply.
The rules dont apply to you.
When Marla sings the same song to Mr. Hughes (Collins is the perfect drunk in this scene), Hughes looks deeply moved, but we don't know if he is moved because his film Hell's Angels is playing in the background or because the song speaks to him. It's a great scene. Beatty has throughout his career played awed characters or cads. This film fills both those personas (as Bugsy and Shampoo did). And Beatty has never been better. This is also as personal as anything he has done.
SPOILER
Howard Hughes freaks out at seeing a small child early in the film, running out of the room presumably because children are germ farms. Later, an incident happens. Marla throws her drunken self at Hughes and ends up pregnant. When she confesses this to him, he is very rude.
A bit later, he has to meet with Raymond Holliday (tremendous work by Dabney Coleman) to discuss selling his father's company. Raymond asks, "Who's DNA are you going to be in?"
Much later in the film, some kids run around his bungalow, and he seems happy to see them. He has moved his interest in legacy onto children. He will confess this to Frank in the next scene.
It will take Marla bringing there son to Mr. Hughes at the end of the film to enliven Mr. Hughes to go on record that a devastating book written about him (by a Mr. Miskin, similar to Bliskin who wrote a book about Beatty) is a hoax. Yes the two young leads come to Hollywood when Beatty did, screen test, one has a murphy bed as Beatty did, but those are just fun details.
Mr. Beatty took 15 years off to raise his children whom he obviously loves very dearly. The hero in the film is ultimately the child. If Love Affair was a love letter to his lovely wife and Bulworth was getting all his political ideals down and Town and Country was a comment on past behavior, Rules is a love letter to his children who are the most important thing in life. This film touched me more than the others perhaps because I want children and just lost a father.


Godard said that most films are 70 percent for a large group of people, and he makes films that are 100 percent for a very small group of people. That seems to be what is going on here. This film was decades in the making, five years were spent trying to find the right actor. The effort has paid off. And Mr. Beatty's legacy is more than intact. Many contemporaries like Redford have twice the filmography as Beatty. But nobody else's films are this good.

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This film was decades in the making, five years were spent trying to find the right actor. The effort has paid off.

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As I note in the linked post, I concur that Beatty cast the film effectively. However, all that time spent casting the movie or searching for the right actor, or whatever Beatty was doing, may have allowed too much rust to build up in his actual filmmaking. And, really, the notion that an eighty-year old might be rusty after not directing a movie in nearly two decades is unsurprising, in retrospect.

http://www.imdb.com/board/11974420/board/thread/261492652?d=263531124#263531124

The film features some good elements and some terrific scenes, some of which you reference. But you note that "this is a frenzied film," and yet if often feels slow and lacking for a flow, in my opinion. (Again, see my linked comments.) At the end of the showing that I attended, one young guy asked his friend, "What just happened?" The other replied, "Dude, nothing happened the whole movie." They may have been overly dismissive, but I can understand why they felt that way. Much of Rules Don't Apply seems out of rhythm, and the fatalism or poignancy that you discuss fails to mesh with the madcap comedy or "frenzied" element. Strangely, the tragic or quixotic tale of Howard Hughes serves the interest of a banal "lost and found" love story.

In Beatty's previous directorial film, Bulworth (which I loved so much that I went back and saw it three straight evenings, during the week between my last class of high school and my high school graduation), he successfully blended that dark sense of fatalism and quixotic, twisted idealism with the element of madcap comedic energy. Not only did that movie feature much better rhythm and flow, but he kept the focus on his main character (played by himself, obviously). In Rules Don't Apply, the main character is more like something to be worked with and worked around. Sure, Beatty illuminates some quirks and poignant elements, as you noted, but in a structural sense, his Hughes serves to complicate and create the melodrama of Marla and Frank. The equivalent in Bulworth would have been to feature a romance between the Halle Berry character and some guy her age and then greatly complicate it due to the senator's chaotic and murky presence. Instead, in that movie nearly twenty years ago, Beatty kept the focus on his eccentric character and all the themes, ironies, and paradoxes that tumble out of him.

Anyway, I appreciate your perspective and passion for the film.

For me it all moves toward something. Hughes grows and changes (in his perception of children for one). The commitee meeting scene is one for instance that people have said was unnecessary yet it gives enough for Frank to still be impressed enough with Hughes to follow him anywhere. By the end, he is a shell for whom even a phone call is a heroic act requiring inspiration.

I agree with your perception of Bulworth and saw it about as much as you did at the time. I was just out of high school. That film had a real plot in the sense that one could give a sentence or two synopsis of the question "What's it about." And it is a nearly perfect film ,but sometimes, the plot mechanics of that film actually get in its way, think the hitman and other loose ends that have to be answered by the film's end.

Rules does not have the same amount of "plot" perhaps, but I am not sure there is a wasted scene, and it has a theme that the film move towards with great depth. In answer to those young people I would say, how many great movies are about things that happen? What actually happens in Shampoo for instance.

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but sometimes, the plot mechanics of that film actually get in its way, think the hitman and other loose ends that have to be answered by the film's end.

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true. As you said "nearly perfect." Bulworth is so rollicking, rambunctious, and outrageous that those strengths of energy and satire tend to overwhelm a "plot mechanic" that the film could have done without.

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Rules does not have the same amount of "plot" perhaps, but I am not sure there is a wasted scene

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a fair point. My issue is more with the flow between scenes and their synergy as opposed to any individual scene, but surely Beatty put a lot of care into the film.

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In answer to those young people I would say, how many great movies are about things that happen? What actually happens in Shampoo for instance.

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not sure what they would make of Shampoo, but I certainly concur that there is something to be said for films that are not overly plot-driven and that instead offer more existential explorations of humanity and society.

My guess is that they might have found Shampoo more compelling than Rules Don't Apply because the older film is so sensual and humorously licentious, and because it is more explicit and perhaps modernistic (even if it is set just a few years after Rules Don't Apply ends, in an era of immense social and cultural turnover, obviously). I know that when I first viewed Shampoo, at nineteen as part of a college class, I did not care for it (although probably not because "nothing happened"). When I viewed the film again, six years later at twenty-five on Turner Classic Movies, I found it terrific.

Thank you for the thoughtful answers, nice to have a good exchange in chat rooms.

I think I understand what you mean by synergy. Particularly in the first hours. Some scenes are so short that a character gets a line of dialog off (usually a line foreshadowing an event "I hope Mr. Hughes doesn't expect to meet you in a hotel room.") then on to something else. When I saw the movie the first time, it felt a bit choppy for the first hour. The second time, having gotten used to it, it felt modern and smart (this film could have easily been three hours by stretching all the brief scenes out then the reviews would have really killed it because most critics felt the story was too slight), like when Deconstucting Harry came out with its abrupt jump cuts.

Yes, I was not blown away by Shampoo either until I saw it later, All Fall Down and The Fortune also took a bit of time to grow on me. Hopefully, these young folks will catch Rules on TCM one day and like it more than they thought they did.

http://officialfan.proboards.com/thread/551722/rules-apply-2016

Among the highlights:

- Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) looks like the Crypt Keeper.

- A religious subplot that makes Ricky Gervais look subtle. (Leaving it at that.)

- Hughes has the ability to make meals appear out of thin air.

- The plot is all over the place. Is it about Hughes being crazy? A romance between ugly people? TWA? The Spruce Goose? The looming threat of Communism? Eating?

- Candice Bergen. In 2016.

- Hughes in on the cutting edge of everything - jets, TV dinners, birth control, DNA

- In one scene, Hughes crashes an airplane. In the very next scene, he's wrapped up like a mummy.

- Anachronisms everywhere. And it's definitely not on purpose.

- The direction is awful. Everything looks so Basic.

- So Much Eating

No surprise that the movie bombed. It was shot the same time as Eastwood shot American Sniper in early 2014; and even before Selma which first started shooting in May 2014. Both American Sniper and Selma were released in December 2014. In contrast to those movies, Rules sat on the shelf for almost three years. Moreover, there were supposedly re-shoots which is always a red flag. There were also supposedly 4 different editors, yet another red flag. Furthermore, there are about 12 different producers, another red flag. Additionally, they either bypassed or were not selected for either SunDance, Cannes, or any of the major film festivals, another red flag.

That's *beep* It was shot in late 2014, early 2015. It took months to edit and it was ready by late 2015 / early 2016 and then it stayed on the shelf for the better part of 2016 and it was released in November.
It didn't sit on the shelf for 3 years.

No you are wrong! It started shooting the same time that Clint started shooting American Sniper in early 2014 and even before Ava started shooting Selma in May 2014. Both Clint and Ava, a second time director, had their far superior movies ready by the end of 2014. Beatty had re-shoots in 2015 to try and fix the movie. When a movie with only a $25 million budget starts shooting in early 2014 and is not released until late 2016, that is yet another big red flag.

If you go on to IMDB Pro, it has the release details. It says that it started shooting in February 2014.

Ok. You're right about that one, punish77. ;)

One of the best movies of the decade.
Masterfully written and directed, impeccably performed by the cast. Cherry on the cake: Caleb Dechanel's cinematography (Online I found posts where RDA was criticized for being filmed on Arri Alexa, rather than 35mm film) is absolutely gorgeous. It's glamour and "retro" only when it has to be BUT, most of the times, is perfectly realistic and - therefore - less self-aware. In other words: the movie doesn't look like a postcard from the 50's / 60's.
I compare Caleb Dechanel's cinematography in RDA to Dante Spinotti's in "L.A. Confidential" (and whoever understands something about cinematography knows that's a compliment).
I hope they will all get the recognition they deserve, come Oscar night.
Fingers crossed.

Hi, Warren! Did Annette forget to feed you your medication, dear? Turn off the computer machine and go back to bed, dear old chap.

Tldr this movie isn't even decent.

can't always listen to RottenTomatoes.

I saw the movie. I think Rotten Tomatoes is a little too high. I think many critics like Beatty in general or are enamored with the nostalgia of old Hollywood. I found the film to be an unfocused disjointed mess. The early part With Alden Ehrenreich and Lilly Collins was good but as soon as Beatty shows up it goes off the rails and slows to a crawl. From then on its very dull and none of the comedy hit its mark for me. I didn't buy Beatty as Hughes.

All is can come down to is personal preference. I feel that Beatty did not embody the real Hughes but used Hughes as means to make a personal film. I was very touched by his performance.

Yeah movies are a very subjective medium.