Well, I Quite Liked Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply.

Warren Beatty’s new movie, his first in 15 years, belatedly opens in the UK today, and it’s received quite the critical drubbing. Indeed, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw opens his one-star review with the following; “Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that we cannot experience death because death is not an event in life. But then Wittgenstein never had to sit through this unbearable new film from Warren Beatty”.

As fun a line as that may be, I’m of the mind that Rules Don’t Apply is a worthwhile piece of cinema, and a film worth seeking out this weekend. Admittedly it is a bit of a slog, but it makes for such an interesting auteurist exercise that I can’t help but recommend it. Allusions between Beatty and his subject, a reclusive Howard Hawks, who the director here plays himself, are clear for all to see, and, should this, as some have suggested, prove to be Beatty’s swansong it’ll make for one hell of an allegory.

It reminded me a bit of Dreyer’s Gertrud.

It’s not a patch on Martin Scorsese’s take on similar territory in The Aviator, but it’s such an odd, quirky project that it demands an audience, and to be the subject of a discourse.