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 don’t apply to you.”
He said it very simply, and quietly too.
But as if there wasn’t any doubt at all that he knew.
He gave me a gift that I would treasure.
He said, “The rules don’t apply to you.”
In the movies we see, in the shows on TV,
And in anthems passionately sung,
There’s a message that you’ve got to keep believing in yourself,
But they generally mean, if you’re young.
It it written in the air, as it seems to be,
That we haven’t long at all to find our destiny?
I’ll always remember to be grateful
That the rules don’t apply to me.
I wouldn’t like.
The rules don’t apply.
The rules don’t 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.