Rules Don't Apply

At this point, Warren Beatty has been off the big screen for 15 years -- or five years longer than Howard Hughes, the man he plays in his new serio-comedy Rules Don't Apply, a recluse so mysteriously out of the public eye. At once an amusingly eccentric take on a billionaire fixated with controlling other people's lives and a romance about a young couple constrained by the conservative religious and social sexual mores of the 1950s, this is a fitfully funny quasi-farce that takes off promisingly, loses its way midflight and comes in for a bumpy but safe landing.

In a flurry of early scenes so short that they are little more than blackouts, lovely young Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) is brought to Los Angeles by her mother, Lucy (Annette Bening), under contract to Hughes at $400 per week. Installed in a lovely Hollywood Hills home, Marla expects to be screen-tested soon but instead finds herself in a holding pattern along with 25 other young and beautiful female hopefuls just like herself.

Marla's driver is the likewise youthful and good-looking Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich, so fine as the hayseed actor in the Coen brothers' '50s Hollywood-set Hail, Caesar!). The two innocents, both of whom are at Hughes' beck and call but mostly have nothing to do, quickly bond, in the spirit of the times, over the matter of their mutual sexual inexperience: Marla freely refers to herself as "the virgin Baptist," while Frank, who's engaged, is similarly without carnal knowledge in a world in which Billy Graham emphasizes abstinence on TV and Hughes insists upon no hanky-panky between his (largely Mormon) male staff and the would-be starlets (whom the lanky Texan obviously wants all to himself).

Hughes, a notorious, if eccentric, lothario, has long been known for his fondness for actresses and his stable of them. But it takes a long time for Marla to realize that she may never even get a screen test. Despite the film's quick sense of tempo and propensity for seeking out humor in the behavior of basically humorless characters, the sense of wasted time for all those in Hughes' orbit is acute and, as Beatty begins to push Hughes further to the center of things, the writer-director's fascination for the eccentricities of the tycoon assert themselves.

Scenes are loaded with, and sometimes completely taken over by, arcane details about the man whom Beatty has been researching since the 1970s, when he first announced his ambition to make a film about Hughes. Some scenes are uniquely devoted to detailing his singular idiosyncrasies, including eating TV dinners off of folding trays, obsessing over the best brassiere design for his actresses, not responding in any humanly known way to questions put to him and obsessing over ice cream.

Unfortunately, with the increased focus on Hughes comes a fraying of attention on Frank and Marla, who are set up from the outset as the primary objects of the audience's emotional involvement, even if Hughes soon emerges as a figure of greater interest. The title tees up the prospect that the two young leads will eventually emerge from their primly maintained shells to bust through their own and their boss's rules. But when something else happens about half-way through, their characters disappointingly fail to expand or deepen.

That said, it's fun to savor the deep detail with which the writer-director has enriched his film, from the very specific nature of Hughes' fetishes to the astonishingly casual way with which he regards enormous financial decisions. The Hollywood in which the film is set is beautifully evoked.

MovieStyle on 11/25/2016