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
