Cafe Society Much?

I also loved "Midnight in Paris." Now THAT was a pure Woody film; one of his best. I wasn't expecting much from Owen Wilson, but he was the perfect choice. Three thumbs up.

I had just drawn the connection on my own before seeing this thread. The two films' basic plots are actually quite similar, which makes one question the point of Rules Don't Apply. In effect, Beatty's Howard Hughes serves the same function as Steve Carell's deliberately bland and quotidian Hollywood agent in Cafe Society, and Rules Don't Apply basically turns out to be just another sentimental romance. Of course, unlike the Carell character, Hughes is an iconic, inscrutable, ambiguous figure—the stuff of myth and legend. But rather than representing a riveting character study, this mysterious, elusive, and nutty figure instead serves the purpose of lending melodramatic excess to Rules Don't Apply. One might even infer that Beatty imagined that in order to appeal to younger audiences or attain financing for the film, he needed to wrap Howard Hughes within this youthful love story.

Both Cafe Society and Rules Don't Apply constitute, in my opinion, disappointments from two senior directors, around eighty years old, with fabled Hollywood careers. Both films are strong technically, in terms of look and sound, yet they falter overall. Cafe Society is mediocre and suffers from poor casting. Rules Don't Apply features actors and actresses who actually fit the parts and often excel, and thus the movie enjoys some excellent scenes and splendid moments. Overall, though, the film is something of a mess. It does not flow well, and one senses that Beatty was trying to fit three hours' worth of material into a running time that slightly exceeds two hours. The two-hour movie plays like a three-hour movie, and in that case, he should have just made a three-hour movie that allowed the story to flow more efficiently and compellingly. Beatty tries to blend madcap comedy and fatalistic tragedy in Rules Don't Apply, but the two moods do not really mesh here and result in something less than engrossing. Often, the film lacks energy, but at other times it is too hectic. Often, the pacing is too slow, but sometimes it is too fast. Again, the casting for the main characters is effective, and the interplay between some of those characters makes for a riveting scene or engaging sequence here or there. There is some good stuff in Rules Don't Apply, but overall, the film limps and almost feels perfunctory—again, the Howard Hughes character study/biopic becomes just another melodrama and romantic restoration, with Hughes serving a structural purpose similar to that of Steve Carell's humdrum agent in Cafe Society. In the end, my feeling is sort of, "All that for this?"

I have found Beatty to be a very talented, enjoyable, and compelling writer-director: Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bulworth are all terrific. (I have only viewed parts of Dick Tracy.) But going nearly two decades between directorial ventures may have been too much for Beatty—Rules Don't Apply suggests that he is rusty. Within the film, one can see the old Beatty still at work, but he fails to bring everything together in a cohesive or dynamic manner.

By the way, to the previous poster, Cafe Society is set in the late 1920s and 1930s, not the 1950s. Hail, Cesar!, conversely, is indeed set during a similar time as Rules Don't Apply (although that film's period is actually a few years earlier, when Hollywood was still fearful of Communist infiltration in the early-to-mid 1950s). I actually thought poorly of Hail, Cesar! when I saw it the first time, but I went back for a second screening and enjoyed the film—it is a ticklish and competent, if minor, satire. A somewhat better movie set in that era was last year's Trumbo.