Hollywood, 1958. Marla Mabrey, a young actress hopeful, dreams of becoming the new star of the scuderia Hughes. Frank Forbes, chauffeur equally young and ambitious, looking for his big break with the american tycoon. In spite of the rules, which would prevent the drivers mingle with starlets, Frank and Marla fall in love with one another. But the ascendant’ of the billionaire, dominant figure immersed in its activities, and consumed by his obsessions, ends to separate them. Between heaven and earth, planes and women, the aviation industry and the film companies, and record routes, prohibited, and after six years all come together in Acapulco. The occasion is a press conference in which Howard Hughes denies ever having met the alleged biographer Richard Miskin. Sick and paranoid behind the curtain that now separates him from the world, ‘receives’ Marla and Frank. She presents the account of Frank resignation.
Eighteen years after Joe, caustic fairy tale politics, Warren Beatty is back to direct his body as an actor in majesty. Democratic senator yesterday, icon, exemplar of the American Dream today, becomes the protagonist of a story turning out to Hollywood in the years of his debut and on a stage mackerel. James Dean is tragically gone, Montgomery Clift face is traumatized by an accident, Marlon Brando has mutineer of the Bounty, and slipped the decline. The project hatched for forty years, The exception to the rule is the transfiguration of film as a career dressed as a romantic comedy, and sunk in the portrait anecdotal of Howard Hughes, eccentric billionaire, visionary megalomaniac, capitalist and fearless metaphor legendary a fate of destruction over the triumph.
Going back the years, searching for his lost time, Warren Beatty resurrects the magical glamour of the Mecca of hollywood and the megalomaniacal dynamism of industrial-days of Hughes. If Scorsese approcciava the gigantism of the magnate without sympathies or convictions (The Aviator), Beatty the embodies a spirit nostalgic placing of the pattern to the center of the scene and its interests (Reds, Dick Tracy, Joe). The performance of Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich serving the ego of the author, and retain their characters, mesmerized by the hyperbole of Hughes-Beatty. On the other hand, the eccentricity of the actor is responding well to that of the character and influence of the charismatic and long-lasting that exerted on its employees.
Started as a romantic comedy, the exception to The rule turns in cinebiografia retracing some of the stages and of the foibles of Hughs: experimental constructions, harem film, test flights, speed records, rides planes, political clashes, paranoia, spavalderie, claustrophobia. If Hughes has to defend its empire and prove his sanity, Warren Beatty try to retain a little glimmer of the kingdom (which fades), exhibiting again an ambition out of the norm. His performance ends up to be the real subject of the film. As the tycoon who plays, Beatty is (too) sure of its effects, and leaves the shore in order to rediscover in the open sea, best under the open sky, the sense of drama and pleasure of improvisation.
The actor indulges in the excesses of the trade, the author imprint the rhythm of the film (its) instinct egotica. Irreducible seducer, you crop an awkward sex scene with Lily Collins, he relies on the role of mother baptist to Annette Bening and ‘blows’ the girl Alden Ehrenreich, in a few plans the reconfirmation of the brightness and the propensity for the anti-hero with a great heart. At the bottom, Warren Beatty remains a prisoner of his image. Closed the curtain in the epilogue, all that remains is a single man who stirs of echoes and tenderness away.