Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Rush

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ron Howard (2013)

    Clumsy, obvious but emotionally effective, Rush tells the story of the battle for the Formula One world championship, in unforgettable 1976, between the polar opposites James Hunt (jokey, blokish, glamorous English playboy) and Niki Lauda (steely, uncharismatic, rat-faced Austrian technocrat).  Ron Howard and Peter Morgan last joined forces on Frost/Nixon (2008):  Hunt-Lauda is preferable if only because no one is going to think it intellectually challenging or sophisticated.  Morgan’s reputation as a quality writer for cinema has wobbled since his heyday as the author of The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United.   Without the crutch of famous people for his main characters, movies by big-name directors from Morgan’s relatively original screenplays – Hereafter, 360 – flopped.  Rush confirms that Morgan isn’t much of a writer.  The irony is that the film may be enough of a hit to enable him to get pretentious all over again.

    The chunks of dialogue in which James Hunt and Niki Lauda speak their minds are crudely expository.  These are accompanied by crass little demonstrations, through their dealings with other people, of the protagonists’ chief characteristics:  here’s Hunt being jovially randy; there’s Lauda showing his stop-at-nothing humourlessness.  Although no fan of Ron Howard, I was a bit shocked that he could be responsible for a biopic as primitive as this.  But it’s hard for the sporting rivalry element, once it gets going, to be so weak, and it isn’t.  This was a very short-lived rivalry, even within a sport which, in those days anyway, wasn’t conducive to longevity of any kind.  When Lauda won his first world championship in 1975, James Hunt finished a remote fourth (with Emerson Fittipaldi and Carlos Reutemann in between).  Hunt was a contender for the title in only the one season but this helps give the story a clearly defined focus.  Rush isn’t an appropriate choice of title – it doesn’t seem to sum up what attracted either Lauda or Hunt to F1 – but it may be a commercially shrewd one.

    The DoP Anthony Dod Mantle and the editors Daniel P Hanley and Mike Hill have done a good job even if the Grand Prix sequences aren’t anything like as powerful as they were in the documentary Senna.  The reason for this is that the drama and excitement of the race are externalised rather than strongly linked to the men behind the wheel.  This may not matter much to the audience at whom the movie is primarily aimed but Rush demonstrates that motor racing isn’t as cine-genic as you might think.  Because of the exceptionally high speeds involved, it’s not the ideal sport for expressing a rivalry in which personal antipathy is an important element.  I got the sense that this antipathy was made more aggressive and personal than it really was in order to build things up:  Hunt and Lauda hate each other’s guts from their first encounter in a Formula 3 race in 1970 and their mutual dislike is presented as an important part of what impels their competitive ambition.  (When Lauda, in a retrospective voiceover at the end of the film, says that Hunt was one of the few drivers that he actually liked, it makes no sense.)   The Formula 3 race sequence is, by the way, a shambles:  Lauda is described by another driver as a newcomer there but we hear a commentator shouting about his ‘ignominious defeat’ in the race – a sporting cliché that is reserved for established names.

    In 1976 I wanted Lauda to win or, rather, Hunt not to win the world championship.  In those days, the outcome of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award wasn’t much less important to me than the results of actual sporting events, however major.  I was very anxious for John Curry to win SPOTY (as it wasn’t known then).  Britain had a disappointing summer Olympics, apart from David Wilkie’s gold in the 200m breaststroke, but when James Hunt won the F1 championship he became clear favourite for the award.  It was a memorable happy surprise when Curry won, with Hunt second and Wilkie third.  Old prejudices die hard and, watching Rush, I was rooting negatively for Lauda all over again.  His comeback after his crash at the West German Grand Prix at the start of August 1976 is unbelievably rapid.  He missed only the next two races, in Austria and Holland:  his return at the Italian Grand Prix only six weeks after the German crash really happened.  Ron Howard and Peter Morgan may be able to say that about most of the movie but they also have a knack for making events seem untrue even if they did occur.  If Niki Lauda was so unpopular with the other drivers, why do the race officials at the Nürburgring even give him a hearing when he asks for the race to be called off because the track conditions are too dangerous?

    Howard isn’t interested in putting the movie convincingly in period.  He’s simply after the essence of enduring sporting champion types:  the iron-willed masochist, the fearless dilettante (Hunt’s habit of throwing up immediately before the start of each race is a rare individual detail).  Chris Hemsworth’s torso is far too muscular for forty years ago – James Hunt didn’t look anything like as gym-built as this – but Hemsworth works hard at the English accent and he takes the camera in a way that Daniel Brühl as Lauda doesn’t.  I think this isn’t a matter of characterisation but has to do with the two actors’ qualities on screen – as performers, they replicate the originals.  Niki Lauda was unprepossessing until the Nürburgring crash in which he sustained disfiguring burns to his face; after that, he was unignorable.  The prosthetics Brühl wears from this point onwards give a focus to his performance too.  Lauda’s accident is a turning point in more ways than one – I don’t think it’s just my ingrained dislike of Hunt that turns Lauda into the main character for the remainder of Rush.  The scenes charting his recovery and return to competition are fundamentally as thin as the rest of the picture but Lauda’s crazy determination does become compelling.

    The women’s roles are perhaps as thankless as those of Hunt and Lauda’s real-life partners.  As Mrs Lauda, Alexandra Maria Lara becomes totally supportive and accepting very quickly.  As the short-lived Mrs Hunt (who then became Mrs Richard Burton for rather longer), Olivia Wilde has a glazed, uninteresting prettiness which is probably right.  (The break-up scene between Hunt and Suzy is particularly bad.)  The F1 commentator is played by Simon Taylor, who really did the job for some years on BBC radio.  Because you naturally think of Murray Walker’s over-excited blare supplying a soundtrack to challenge the scream and drone of the cars, however, Taylor sounds seriously under-powered. The tedious, portentous-anthemic music is unmistakeably Hans Zimmer.

    15 September 2013

  • Rope

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1948)

    The Patrick Hamilton play, set in Mayfair, is inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder, which took place in Chicago in 1924.  In Hume Cronyn’s treatment for Hitchcock’s film, for which Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay, the story moves back across the Atlantic, to New York, and the setting is contemporary.  Hitler is mentioned as a thing of the past and there are tedious jokey references to Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, James Mason and (I guess) even to some other Hitchcock movies of the forties.   It’s not much of an adaptation:  Rope’s theatre origins are creakily evident, and there’s acting to match – the kind of acting which, because the mechanics of it are so apparent, can be uncomfortable to watch even from the front rows of theatre stalls and which, on screen, is terrible.   This fussy, hollow lack of subtlety is especially evident in John Dall’s portrait of Brandon Shaw, the nerveless prime mover in the murder that we see accomplished in the film’s first shot, as Brandon and his neurotic junior partner-in-crime, Phillip Morgan, strangle a former classmate called David Kentley.  This may be a bit unfair on Dall:  perhaps his by-the-book, obvious performance is conspicuously bad largely because Farley Granger, as Phillip, is so vapid.  The coarse acting competition among the supporting roles is keen too:  contenders include Joan Chandler as the murderee’s fiancée, Constance Collier as his palm-reading aunt, and Edith Evanson as Brandon and Phillip’s housekeeper.   You sometimes wonder if Hitchcock cast mediocre actors because they’d be less likely to distract attention from his own resource and inventiveness.

    Brandon and Phillip put David’s body in a big wooden chest, cover it with a tablecloth and candlesticks and serve food and drink from the coffin-top, at a party where the guests include the dead man’s father (Cedric Hardwicke).  As usual, Hitchcock is determined to amuse himself, even though the running joke of the stage play – that the object containing the corpse stays in view throughout – doesn’t naturally lend itself to a moving picture.  Hitchcock decided to emphasise the constraints of the material.  His famous experiment here with very few, very long takes, continuously panning from one performer to another, has the effect of throwing into relief the stagy acting and the ping-pong of stage dialogue.  The most amusing camera movements occur in long shots of characters receding from the room where the main action takes place to the kitchen:  the housekeeper’s to and fro, as she clears the top of the chest at the end of the party, is particularly enjoyable.  The huge cyclorama of a New York City skyline is entertaining too – to quote Wikipedia:

    ‘It included models of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings. Numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset slowly unfolds as the movie progressed. At about one hour into the film, a red neon sign in the far background showing Hitchcock’s profile with “Reduco” – the fictitious weight loss product used in his Lifeboat (1944) came – is visible for just a moment. Within the course of the film, the clouds – made of spun glass -change position and shape a total of eight times.’

    (Needless to say, I missed Hitchcock’s appearance.)  There’s the odd detail that makes the director look careless, however.  At one point, Phillip is suppressing his anguish so furiously that he breaks the glass he’s holding and cuts his hand badly.  It has healed completely by the time the aunt reads his palm a couple of screen minutes later.

    It’s apparently a matter of argument as to whether the Chicago University students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had a homosexual relationship but the camp, bitchy flavour of much of the writing in Rope and the mannerisms of John Dall in particular make it hard, Production Code notwithstanding, to see Brandon and Phillip as anything other than gay.   Leopold and Loeb – whose victim, Bobby Franks, was only fourteen years old – wanted to commit the perfect crime.  Brandon Shaw is motivated by the intellectual challenge of murdering David Kentley – by the thrill of confirming, through killing David, his and Phillip’s superiority to their victim.  (Everyone else in the story seems to adore David:  it’s not clear whether Brandon is envious or simply despises David or wants him for himself.)  There’s talk of the Ubermensch and so on but I didn’t understand either why Brandon was so pleased by the cleverness of what he and Phillip had done or what made him see it as a perfect murder.  (There seems a fair chance of things going wrong – for example, it’s only because the traffic’s bad that the housekeeper doesn’t arrive back at the apartment earlier.)  The most sadistically remarkable aspect of the crime is the killers’ invitation to David Kentley’s parents to spend a social evening in the company of their son’s corpse.

    We’re given to understand that Brandon got his Nietzschean ideas from his and Phillip’s former schoolmaster, Rupert Cadell.   When James Stewart as Rupert first arrives at the party, it’s briefly invigorating – the arch lines, when Stewart is speaking them, sound witty and unforced.   But Hitchcock photographs him too soon and too often registering, quietly but tellingly, what Brandon and Phillip have been up to.  Besides, James Stewart isn’t convincing as someone who would propound the subversive, egomaniac philosophy that triggers the crime, even allowing for the fact that Rupert’s theories have been perverted by the psychopathic Brandon.   The casting of Stewart may have been intended to mute the gay textures of the material and is, to that extent, effective – but someone like George Sanders would have been more comfortable spouting Rupert’s sub-Wildean epigrams.

    10 July 2010

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