RULES DON’T APPLY

         As Warren Beatty’s new movie Rules Don’t Apply demonstrates, Donald Trump is not the first loony billionaire to entrance the media; though undoubtedly smarter than the Great Creamsicle, Howard Hughes was also crazier.  Like Trump, however, he advertised his exploits loud and often; the heir to a great industry; he designed and flew airplanes, produced movies, and collected a stable of starlets.   Martin Scorsese’s Aviator dealt with Hughes in his most successful years, when he was a Hollywood legend and dated, among others, Katharine Hepburn.  Beatty’s movie, which stars him as Hughes, concentrates mostly on his later years as his eccentricities declined into insanity.

Despite serving as the central character, Beatty only sporadically appears, mostly as a strange figure in the background of a burgeoning love between one of his drivers detailed to chauffeur one of his aspiring actresses.  Lily Collins plays Marla Mabrey, who comes to Hollywood with her mother (Annette Bening) for a promised screen test.  Hughes supplies her with her own house, her own driver/watcher, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), so she can follow a daily routine that, frustratingly, never actually culminates in the test.  Neither she nor Frank even meets their employer until well into the movie, when they must deal with his manifold idiosyncratic practices and demands.

In addition to the generally insipid relationship between the two young people, the film shows some of Hughes’s general lunacy—paying his gaggle of hopeful performers by dangling envelopes of cash from upper story windows, insisting on flying (and crashing) an untested airplane, his famous wooden flying boat, his purchase of all supplies of banana nut ice cream, his expectation of a ticker tape parade in Washington, where no buildings tall enough for such an event exist, his constant screening of his great hit Hell’s Angels, etc., etc.—which grows less and less interesting as the movie progresses.  Rules Don’t Apply also features a whole constellation of stars of various magnitudes—Matthew Broderick, Paul Sorvino, Amy Madigan, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt (I may have missed a few), possibly all friends of Beatty.

The movie runs quite long, perhaps to accommodate all those players, repeats itself endlessly, and turns a perhaps once interesting personality into a mercurial eccentric who mumbles uninteresting lines and mostly dwells in darkness.  Nobody seems in the least compelling, including the central character, and very little in the film makes it worth watching.  One of the rules that Beatty doesn’t apply is the obligation to make the story, the people, and the action watchable, an obligation he overlooked in Rules Don’t Apply.