Rules Don’t Apply

Warren Beatty finally releases his Howard Hughes project, and the result says more about Beatty than it does about Hughes.

Marla (Lily Collins) is an enthusiastic starlet from Virginia who has passed up a university scholarship to seek fame in the movies. She’s assigned personal chauffeurs Frank (Alden Ehrenreich) and Levar (Matthew Broderick), working alternate shifts, and attends dance and acting classes with the likes of Mamie (Haley Bennett), but, much to the chagrin of her mother Lucy (Annette Bening), is not met by Howard Hughes, and cashes paycheques while never being given her promised screen-test. But Frank is in the same boat. When they finally get to meet the eccentric recluse, their mutual attraction is already in danger of getting them both fired for immoral behaviour, if the deranged antics of Hughes; locked in conflict with TWA shareholders, Merrill Lynch money men, his CEO, and paranoid about being declared paranoid; don’t destroy their careers and/or their lives first.

One hesitates to say that Warren Beatty is so vain he made a film about himself, but the long build-up to the first appearance of Hughes, his persistent appearance in dim lighting to hide the rigours of age, the power-tripping of keeping people endlessly waiting for no reason, the constant baloney of stringing people along with projects that are never going to happen, the phone calls at all hours of day and night that must be answered, and the endless cooing to Hughes of his genius by pretty young women, all seem to speak more to the actual Beatty that emerges from Peter Biskind’s biography than to any real portrayal of Hughes. And let’s remember that Beatty; actor, co-writer, director, producer; has been working on this script since about 1980. This was, par Biskind’s narrative, to be the magnum opus.

2/5

Handsome Devil

Writer/director John Butler follows The Stag with a film that is somehow much better put together yet actually more infuriating.

Ned (Fionn O’Shea) complains volubly to his father and stepmother (Ardal O’Hanlon, Amy Huberman) about being sent back to boarding school. They don’t care. He complains volubly to his principal (Michael McElhatton) about being forced to share his room with a rugby player Conor (Nicholas Galitzine). He doesn’t care. He then complains volubly to the audience about the importance given to rugby in this school; which is apparently meant to be Blackrock, but somehow seems more like Clongowes; and how awful it is to be a gay student in a heteronormative school. Little does he know that his new roommate has a secret, a big one, that by the end of term will change the school forever.

There is a reference to the Berlin Wall as if it’s still standing, and our hero plagiarises The Undertones, so it’s the 1980s, right? Except for the prominently featured poster of the cover of Suede’s debut album, from 1993. But that doesn’t really matter, right? I mean, it’s not like that year has any special significance. It’s only when Ireland decriminalised homosexuality, so it probably doesn’t impinge on the seriousness of Andrew Scott’s teacher being outed to the principal. It is unfortunate for such slapdash writing to reach Irish cinemas mere months after the innovative and spot-on recreation of period detail in Mike Mills’ 20^th Century Women, which was actually concerned with replicating the felt experience of life in 1979 California.

2/5

Private Lives

The Gate celebrates its regime change by producing a Noel Coward play. Plus ca change, and all that drivel, darling.

Our man Elyot (Shane O’Reilly) arrives at a spiffy hotel in old Deauville for a second honeymoon, as it were, this being his second marriage. His present wife Sibyl (Lorna Quinn) tediously cannot stop talking about his previous wife Amanda (Rebecca O’Mara) and do you know the damndest thing happens; doesn’t she turn out to be staying in the very next room with her present husband, dear old Victor (Peter Gaynor). Whole thing is most extraordinary… Would you credit that their balconies even adjoin?! Sibyl and Victor make themselves so beastly when Elyot and Amanda both independently try to escape this positively sick-making set-up that it really serves them right when El and Am decide to simply decamp together to their old flat in Paris to avoid all the unpleasantness. But the course of true love never did run smooth…

Coward’s ‘intimate comedy’ is a sight too intimate for its own good here. One misses the variety afforded by recent hilarious outings by waspish ensembles for Hay Fever and The Vortex at the Gate. Instead we have a four-hander, and for the whole second act largely a two-hander, where you keep wondering if director Patrick Mason was foiled in casting his regular foil Marty Rea by the latter’s touring commitments. Mason and Rea have triumphed with Sheridan, Stoppard, Coward, Wilde, and you feel Rea urgently needs to play Elyot before he ages out. O’Mara and Quinn are patently too old for their parts, and it makes great bosh of Coward’s script if the naive 23 year old that Elyot flees to here is obviously thirtysomething, while instead of seeking the stolidity of an older man Amanda has married a contemporary.

O’Reilly is nicely abrupt as Elyot, but he and O’Mara never quite reach the heights for which these parts are constructed. But they deliver a wonderfully choreographed fight, chaos so exploding you feel it must topple offstage.  Tellingly the audience reacted with shock when he pushed her, but laughed when she broke an LP over his head… Francis O’Connor’s set design reuses familiar elements (The Father, Waiting for Godot) but its transformation from art deco hotel to primitive chic flat is a marvel and delight. There are also divine musical jokes as Coward’s ‘20th Century Blues’ plays between acts, and Rachmaninov’s 2^nd Piano Concerto (the soul of Coward’s Brief Encounter) mixes with Hitler on the wireless. And did anyone from the Gate see Gaynor in Hedda Gabler? He can do bombast well, but subtle even better; give him a chance!

This, then, is how the Gate Theatre as it was during the Age of Colgan ends, not with a bang but a whimper, and what rough beast slouches towards the Rotunda to be born?

3/5

Private Lives continues its run at the Gate for ever so long.

Table 19

Anna Kendrick stars in a slightly unusual romcom that is notable for being more amiable than the usual Hollywood fare.

Kendrick is Eloise, the ex-maid of honour, who is still attending her best friend’s wedding despite being ditched from the bridal party after breaking up with the best man Wyatt Russell, brother of the bride. To avoid awkwardness she is relegated to the back of the room, Table 19. And as she planned the wedding Eloise knows just what a humiliation this is: seated next business acquaintances of the bride’s father, Craig Robinson and Lisa Kudrow, a nanny, June Squibb, a ‘successful businessman’ who is clearly nothing of the sort, Stephen Merchant, and a frustrated teenage lothario, Tony Revolori.

The Breakfast Club is an obvious point of reference for Table 19, and there is an undeniably goodhumoured spirit to proceedings that counts for much. But the presence of the Duplass brothers as original screenwriters makes you wonder what this movie was envisioned as in earlier drafts, especially as a striking camera movement when Eloise dances with a stranger and the best man sees it almost feels like a leftover from a draft where the real time wedding was being imagined as one single long take.

Table 19 isn’t hilarious, but it is more thoughtful than one would imagine and hides its grand romantic gesture with some glee.

3/5