Can we stop telling stories about Howard Hughes now?

What is so fascinating about Howard Hughes that he deserves so many movies about his life? On the surface, Hughes did lead an interesting life. He was a zillionaire, a movie mogul, a daredevil in an airplane, a real ladies’ man (he was an epically bad boyfriend to many a Hollywood star) and a complete eccentric: all the ingredients required for a typical American “character”, and we sure do love “characters”. But every time someone makes another movie about Howard Hughes, the result is insufferably dull and uninspired (Scorsese’s The Aviator). And now Warren Beatty has ventured into Hughes territory with Rules Don’t Apply, which Beatty wrote, directed and stars in, as the aging eccentric himself. The film takes place mostly in 1959, with Hughes in his prolonged mental illness phase, except that he was still trying to achieve new levels of greatness as a filmmaker and an aviator and a tycoon.

Howard Hughes, like all the other memorable characters to come out of Hollywood’s golden era, is the closest thing to royalty we have: an heir to oil like a British monarch is an heir to royal blood. But there’s no lack of obtuse valentines to old rich white men in this country, and Rules Don’t Apply doesn’t break any new ground in its quest to understand, or mock, or merely exhibit, Hughes’s eccentric life. Warren Beatty, who did excellent work in films like Shampoo (1975), made a common mistake of many an actor-turned-director (starting with Reds in 1981): he turned to “important” material (in the case of Reds, the Russian Revolution) as a way to elevate his filmmaking, forgetting that much of the best American filmmaking of the 1970s eschewed the effrontery of prestige. Rules Don’t Apply makes a similar error, refusing to contain its man-obsession with Howard Hughes, who was essentially a real-life Jay Gatsby, the kind of man we’ve been trained to idolize: self-made and rich and eccentric, yet not really self-made, because in Jay Gatsby’s case, he resorted to organized crime to earn his millions, and in Hughes’s case, he inherited his first big swath of cash (just like our new President). 

As a film, Rules Don’t Apply is beautifully made, and every costume, every prop, every wall, seems to have been designed with care and precision. But it's also frustratingly uneven. Hughes was known for being stubborn, unpredictable, and erratic. The movie’s tone and rhythm somehow internalize these Hughesian qualities, and as a result, we never feel confident or secure in the narrative that Beatty is trying to tell. Movies should be unpredictable, but they shouldn’t feel so shaky that we question the very competency of the storytelling, as though the movie itself is Howard Hughes, and we’re Frank, the dutiful assistant played by Alden Ehrenreich, who incidentally gives the film’s best performance. Ehrenreich has star appeal: a pleading look in his eyes and a sense of daring-do beneath that handsome face, like he could easily turn into a rascal or a hood if called upon. (He’s been cast to play a young Han Solo in some new Star Wars offshoot.) 

The plot involves Hughes’s coterie of starlets, impressionable would-be actresses he’s set up in Hollywood bungalows with a salary of $400 a week and a driver at their beck and call, not to mention vague promises of a screen test. The main starlet in question is named Marla Mabrey (played by Lily Collins), a stuffy fundamentalist girl from Virginia, who doesn’t drink. Collins gives an earnest performance, but she never satisfies in this movie about stars, because Marla isn’t really star material. Indeed, Marla displays refreshing honesty about her prospects as a movie star. At one point she says something to the effect of: “I can’t sing that well, I don’t have big bosoms, and I think too much. I know how this business works, and that’s not what they’re looking for.” At least she’s self-aware, and the choices Marla makes leave her with her dignity mostly intact. And, star or no star, Marla does catch the eye of Frank, her driver, but their budding romance is complicated by Hughes’s draconian rules: his girls aren’t supposed to engage in any extracurricular activities with Hughes’s employees. (Their love story is, finally, the most compelling thing about Rules Don't Apply; it's the thing that keeps us watching.)

As Hughes, Beatty gives an impressive performance, but even that is marred by the film’s tonal incongruities. We never know if Beatty’s adoration for Hughes is totally sincere, or tongue-in-cheek. He’s certainly nowhere near the dark, critically poetic level of Orson Welles, depicting the empty, selfish life of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane. And after multiple scenes where the camera closes in on a dimly lit shot of Hughes crying about his daddy, viewers may decide they’ve had enough of Hughes, even if the relics of Hollywood haven’t.

With Candice Bergen, reduced to playing a secretary and given nothing interesting to do or say; Anette Bening as Marla’s paranoid, fanatical mother; Matthew Broderick, as one of Hughes’s yes men, who has an amusing outburst after he’s taken all he can take from his boss; and featuring brief appearances by Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Ed Harris, Paul Schneider, Steve Coogan, Dabney Coleman, Amy Madigan, Oliver Platt, and Hart Bochner. 

Aloha

The controversy surrounding writer-director Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Aloha, is becoming more significant than the movie itself. In case you aren’t aware of the backlash against Crowe, it involves his casting Emma Stone as a character who’s one-fourth native Hawaiian. The argument--which is being raised more and more frequently against Hollywood--hinges on the problem of under-representation in mainstream movies of vital, well-drawn characters who are not white and/or not male. Crowe’s response has been considerably respectful and apologetic, but it may also fall under the old adage, “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Crowe wrote:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice. As far back as 2007, Captain Allison Ng was written to be a super-proud ¼ Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one. A half-Chinese father was meant to show the surprising mix of cultures often prevalent in Hawaii. Extremely proud of her unlikely heritage, she feels personally compelled to over-explain every chance she gets. The character was based on a real-life, red-headed local who did just that.

I must confess, the issue of Stone’s character’s ethnicity did not strike me as I was watching the film. I figured she was an American Hawaiian: someone of European descent whose parents or grandparents moved to Hawaii; only now do I recall Stone’s explanation of her ancestors, as well as her overzealous appreciation for the mythology of Hawaii. (It feels forced.) As I read over Crowe’s statement, I remembered a scene early in the film in which Stone’s character spells her name out loud, pronouncing it for Bradley Cooper’s character. That’s when she goes into a diatribe about her heritage, but it was lost on me. Crowe’s dialogue, particularly in the first third of Aloha, is muddled and even difficult to understand at times. You feel lost in it: it’s like bad old Hollywood writing; and really, the dialogue in old Hollywood movies was never this convoluted or confusing; it was dreamy nonsense. Crowe’s dialogue for Aloha is striving to be dreamy nonsense, and achieving only the latter part of its goal.

Stone plays an Air Force pilot assigned to shadow Cooper’s character while he’s visiting Honolulu. (The why is still a mystery to me, much like many of the film’s wobbly plot elements.) A romance develops between the two of them, only it’s not really credible, and there’s a half-hearted attempt at a love triangle, because Cooper runs into his ex-girlfriend, played by Rachel McAdams, who is now married to pilot John Krasinski. I adore Rachel McAdams, and she’s very good in Aloha, but she’s often forgotten by the movie, and Crowe does a generally terrible job at resolving the conflict between her and her husband, who’s comically incapable of carrying on a conversation. (His taciturn manner serves as the source of one admittedly genius moment later in the movie, which might justify rushing to theaters to see this movie before it’s gone.)

I think this is the first time I’ve ever felt critical of an Emma Stone performance. She’s uneven in a lot of the movie, but this is really the fault of Crowe’s writing. In the first half of the film, Stone talks too fast, like one of those madcap comic actresses from the 1940s, the way that Mary Astor did in the zizzy Preston Sturges comedy The Palm Beach Story. And Stone kind of looks like she’s doing a Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday) impersonation. She’s a go-getter and a busybody and she’s as crazily devoted to the integrity of her job and her state as Leslie Knope, the indefatigable parks department director of Pawnee, Indiana. But something about the Stone character’s reference to old Hollywood actresses and old Hollywood comedy doesn’t work, and it certainly doesn’t pay off, because by the time we’ve gotten used to it, she changes back into a modern-day girl, just in time to criticize Bradley Cooper’s character for letting a crazy billionaire send an armed satellite into space.

Aloha is an incredibly problematic film structurally and morally. Crowe introduces a lot of big moral dilemmas for his characters, and somehow manages to bungle them all. Bill Murray plays the mad billionaire who has essentially taken the place of NASA; he and Cooper are the only ones who know of his plans to put weapons in space; but in the end, Cooper walks away with impunity because he sabotages the satellite, and Murray is arrested. Somehow that feels too easy, and moreover, too complicated, for what should have been a simple, enjoyable romantic comedy.

There are other moral issues at stake here. Aloha is trying to do some kind of Hawaiian heritage public relations, but it fails pretty miserably. Go back and watch John Sayles’s wonderful Sunshine State (2002) if you want to see it done right. Sayles tapped into the psyche of Floridians, as well as the pulse of the developers trying to make money off of them; Crowe is trying to do the same thing in Aloha. I knew it was a bad sign when the movie’s opening credits showed us vintage Hawaii imagery in a vacant cultural collage as the names materialized on screen. Crowe is only scratching the surface, and George Clooney’s The Descendants did more to tap into the culture of Hawaii than this movie does. And worse yet, Crowe's attempts to address American imperialism in Hawaii have no depth to them: the Americans are the center of this film, and Hawaii and its people are basically in the way. Cooper is, after all, sent to Hawaii to try and sweet-talk them into letting Bill Murray launch his space program there without any objections from them.

Alas, here’s my problem: I walked away liking this movie a little more than my review indicates. It pushed enough of my buttons (especially that sentimental ending, which I won’t reveal, involving a character and his daughter) to give me a decent time. I loved Rachel McAdams and John Krasinski’s characters. I wanted the movie to spend more time with them, fleshing out their personalities and conflicts. I quite enjoyed the brief onscreen moments of Alec Baldwin as an Air Force commander. I appreciated Crowe’s attempts to understand the implications of a world without NASA. All of these ingredients worked to some degree or another, even if the movie as a whole wasn’t successful. It's one of the strangest movie experiences I've had in a long time. But it has charm and vitality, and amidst its many problems, there is a good movie, hiding, needing to be plucked out.

Still Alice

  In Still Alice, Julianne Moore triumphs in a role that would be tempting to write off as a pointed Oscar grab. Moore’s performance—as Alice Howland, a successful linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease—is haunting and complex, showing us the progression of a disease in a very believable way without sacrificing the dignity of her character. Still Alice might have been the kind of middlebrow message movie that the Oscars delight in, except for the fact that its treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is raw and authentic. The movie doesn’t strain for prestige as much as we might expect. Instead, it weaves compelling scenes together of Alice the successful intellectual (author of noteworthy books on language development), Alice the happy wife (married to a fellow academic, played by Alec Baldwin), and Alice the mother of three grown children (played by Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, and Kristen Stewart), who struggles with a disease but is not defined by it.

     If we have to sit through a movie as depressing as Still Alice, I’m glad we can do it in the company of the great Julianne Moore. (Granted, I’m biased. She is one of my favorite actresses, and I was more than a little adamant that she deserved an Oscar for this performance even before I saw the movie.) And yes, Still Alice is a tough movie to watch. Few films released in 2014 so boldly stared viewers in the face with their own mortality. How many of us have loved ones who struggle with this and other diseases which seemingly erase their personalities, taking them from us long before their bodies give out?

    The writing-directing team of Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (who adapted Lisa Genova’s novel of the same name), understand how to make a movie about human suffering and frailty without giving in to the temptation to preach or pander. Of course, viewers are likely to experience a “Niagara Falls” kind of emotional reaction to this movie anyway. This is a movie that will break your heart, not the least of which because it feels like we’re watching Julianne Moore develop Alzheimer’s. That is probably the hardest thing to take: seeing an actor you love suffer on the screen in such an urgent and real way. But because Still Alice is honest, and because its emotional wallops are never cheaply constructed, its melodramatic content works beautifully, the way tearjerkers should.  

    Emotions are such tricky things, and Hollywood movies so often falter when they try to dramatize the real emotions people feel. Still Alice gets at the complexity of those emotions for all the members of Alice’s family. We see the panic in Alice’s children when they are confronted with her disease; we see the denial and cowardice (and self-loathing) of her husband, who at the beginning assures Alice that he will stand by her, never believing just how costly this struggle will be; we see Alice, bravely speaking about her illness at an Alzheimer’s convention, using a highlighter to follow the lines of her speech. (In a prior scene, her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress living in L.A. who’s played by Kristen Stewart, suggests—via Skype—that her mom’s speech is too technical, not personal enough; Alice angrily ends the chat and turns away, frustrated at how difficult the task of writing has become; but she reworks the speech, and the movie doesn’t feel the need to show her revision process: we get it in the delivery itself, and it’s moving and inviting. If a movie must offer a kind of TED-talk presentation on a degenerative illness, the way Still Alice does so is the most effective, the most poignant method: humanizing, sympathetic, not self-pitying or self-absorbed.)

    I had a hard time convincing anyone to see Still Alice with me. And it’s no wonder. How do you recommend a movie like this—even when it’s so, so good—when you know people are going to be sad watching it? At some level, we go to movies like Still Alice for catharsis. The emotional intensity of the material demands that we confront our own fears. Perhaps the most honest thing Alice says is about the way this disease assaults her very identity, which is so wrapped up in her success as a professional thinker. Still Alice doesn’t try to explain this injustice. It confronts the tragedy—and the beauty—of human existence. And believe it or not, the movie isn’t a total bummer. “How can you call my life tragic?” Alice wonders. “I’ve had a successful career, a happy, stable marriage, three wonderful children” [I’m paraphrasing].”

    So, go see Still Alice, even though you are going to be sad, during and after. But let the intense gratitude of the film wash over you as much as the sorrow. My favorite moment in Still Alice occurs during Alice’s speech at the convention, when she quotes that lovely poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, giving it a new kind of heartbreaking and beautiful meaning. I think I’ll close with it.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Beetle Juice

The creators of Beetle Juice (1988)--it was conceived by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, scripted by McDowell and Warren Skaaren, and directed by Tim Burton--must have grown up on a healthy dose of EC Comics, The Addams Family, and B horror films. This was Burton's second film (following 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure), and it remains his most imaginative comedy, a dazzling display of creativity and ghoulish humor that could have been concocted by the likes of children's author Roald Dahl if he and Stephen King were both writing a book together, on acid.

The plot, for those who haven't seen this, involves a self-employed married couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who are trying to enjoy their vacation in their large Connecticut house, until a tragic accident leaves them dead, newly inducted in the afterlife, and confined to their house as prisoners. This wouldn't be so bad, except an obnoxious New York couple (Catherine O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones) buys the house, and the wife proceeds to remodel it according to her decidedly abstract artistic tastes, with the help of an eccentric interior decorator named Otho (Glen Shadix), who's also interested in all things paranormal. The ghosts find a friend in the NYC couple's depressed teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), whose natural attraction to dark things allows her to see them when almost no one else can.

While Beetle Juice is obviously the product of minds that were immersed in all things macabre and darkly funny, it doesn't feel derivative. Its unusual story continues to develop in unexpected directions, and the cast creates amusing, eccentric performances that make this purely fun, not weird or off-putting. Baldwin rarely played likable guys until his wonderful performance on the television show 30 Rock, but in Beetle Juice he's sort of an easy-going guy who's not trying to snow anybody in. Geena Davis, with her puckered face and her dark, curly hair, looks very maternal. O'Hara generates an almost kinetic weirdness with her performance as the fruity stepmom, who's devoted to her "art" (tacky-looking abstract sculptures that look like enlarged, black insects).

And Michael Keaton, as the bio exorcist hired to scare the new family out of the dead couple's beloved home, gives new meaning to the term "loose cannon." In Batman, Keaton was completely overshadowed by the performance of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. If it weren't for Beetle Juice, we wouldn't have known how insane Keaton can be. It adds such a delightful comic side to his acting abilities that almost every performance afterward is tainted, imbued with a tacit reminder that "this is the guy who played Beetle Juice."

There are few movies as original as Beetle Juice, and out of all the comedies to come out of the 80s, this one ranks as one of the most enduring and enjoyable. Also starring Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett. Music by Danny Elfman, the lead singer of the 80s rock band Oingo Boingo, who has composed the scores of every Tim Burton film.