It’s hard to make a bad Howard Hughes movie, but Warren Beatty has pulled it off with Rules Don’t Apply, the first movie he’s directed in 18 years and the first movie in which he’s acted in 15. He is being treated kindly by the press for this calamity of a motion picture, for which there is no excuse save his advanced age, his remembered glamour, and his left-wing politics. You pick.
Howard Hughes has been one of the most reliable real-life subjects the movies have ever seen. Start with the gorgeous and fanciful Melvin and Howard from 1980, which accepts as true the almost certainly false claim by a man named Melvin Dummar that he picked up a hitchhiking Hughes one night outside Las Vegas and found himself the heir to the billionaire’s fortune. Jason Robards plays Hughes as a bitter and homeless drifter transformed for a moment by an ordinary person’s kindness in one of American cinema’s most touching comedies.
Move on to The Aviator (2004), in which Leonardo DiCaprio provided a captivating glimpse into the young and dashing Hughes as he made movies that took years and built crazy planes that could barely fly before he began to go insane. Take a trip back in time to 1949’s ice-cold Caught, a pretty daring portrait of Hughes during his own lifetime, in which the now-forgotten Robert Ryan played him as a ruthless and depraved lunatic. Jump forward to the 1977 TV movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, in which an unknown actor named Tommy Lee Jones was so incandescent in playing the man at every stage of his life that he practically exploded every cathode-ray tube in America.
They were all great, all these Hughes actors and all these Hughes movies. And why not? Hughes is every amazing 20th-century American story, good and bad, rolled into one. Poor little rich kid. Brilliant inventor. Playboy obsessed with showbiz. Genius businessman with an enormous self-destructive streak. And of course, paranoid obsessive so rich he had the means to live out his craziness exactly as he demanded and ended his life alone with a pauper’s beard in a hotel room watching Ice Station Zebra over and over again.
So what does Beatty add to the Hughes filmography? Nothing. He has taken a sure-fire winner of a subject and made a total hash of it. First, he can’t decide whether the movie is about Hughes, whom he plays, or about two twentysomethings who exist in his orbit in the years between 1958 and 1964. The first half-hour is about the kids, and it’s so incompetently and bizarrely told that you don’t know how much time is passing between the scenes—could be two weeks, could be two years.
Beatty seems to have been away from the screen so long he’s forgotten the rudiments of film language and editing; scenes featuring the Hollywood youngsters smash into each other so quickly you don’t even know why you saw the one he’s just cut away from. (Rules Don’t Apply has four credited editors, and I’m guessing that it has four credited editors because three of them ran away in horror.)
The girl, an actress named Marla (Lily Collins) whom he puts on retainer without ever meeting her, is cute and interesting. The boy, a driver named Frank (Alden Ehrenreich) who wants to be an affordable-housing real-estate developer, is dull and uninteresting. So when the movie ditches their story and takes up Hughes’s story, who’s along for the ride? Not Marla, whom we might want to spend more time with. No, it’s Frank, who is as colorless as the black suit he wears.
And what is the Hughes story Beatty wants to tell? It’s all of them and none of them. It’s flying planes like a loon, trying to avoid having his business taken away from him by bankers, and moving from hotel to hotel. It’s Hughes repeating the same phrase four times (a detail handled far better and more chillingly in The Aviator). He giggles unconvincingly and talks wistfully about his father, who died when he was 18. Hughes was in his fifties when the movie’s action takes place. It’s one thing for a lunatic in his fifties to yell at someone with whom he’s having a business disagreement by saying “you’re not my father,” and quite another for Beatty, who’s almost 80, to do it. Hughes is supposed to be crazy, not senile.
By the last 20 minutes, when the movie features superimposed titles like “Managua, Nicaragua” and “London, England” to tell you where the action is taking place—and cuts back and forth between them, showing the titles a second time, as though you might have forgotten—you just relax in your seat knowing you’re seeing an all-time train wreck and you might as well sit back and enjoy the destruction. Rules Don’t Apply, which shouldn’t have been released at all, had the worst opening of any major studio film this year. The last movie to do nearly so badly was something called Victor Frankenstein. “Fear not,” says the monster at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “that I shall be the instrument of future mischief.”
Warren Beatty should take this to heart and retire for good now.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
