RUSH
As a Formula One race fan and someone who is vaguely familiar with the principal figures profiled in the film. I had big expectations for Ron Howard's latest film, Rush. The movie tells the story of rivals James Hunt, (played by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (German actor Daniel Brühl) as they battled through their racing careers, starting out in Formula Three, a feeder series, and culminating in the 1976 Formula One season, where they battled for the World Championship until the very last race. The rivalry that Hunt, a well spoken, charismatic Brit, and Lauda, a mechanically gifted, but brooding Austrian shared on the track that season is legendary, with both men pushing beyond their limits on and off the track, the consequences of which both men had to live with for the rest of their lives. In terms of expectations, Rush lived up to the ambitious promotional campaign, as well as the personal expectations of this reviewer.
Formula One is the most technologically advanced racing series in the world. Drawing its drivers from every habitable continent on earth, it is the most popular annual world championship, even if it only occupies a tiny niche in the American market, and is nowhere near as popular as NASCAR, America's de facto national motorsport. Formula One is a sport of glamour and near-obscene excess; the biggest grand prix drivers are global superstars who have supermodels for girlfriends, live luxuriously in Monte Carlo villas, and make tens of millions of dollars a year to race about twenty weekends. In its modern iteration, it is also a sport that prides itself on its safety innovation, with no drivers dying during a race weekend since the three-time Brazilian World Champion Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. In 1976, the year that Rush is set, deaths were an accepted reality of drivers, with Hemsworth's James Hunt saying, "The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel. It's a wonderful way to live. It's the only way to drive." The drivers at the time did not want to die, but they lived with a reality that the longer they did their jobs, the greater the chances were that they would die in a racing accident.
At its core, Rush is not a film about racing but a film about a rivalry between two men who happen to be among the greatest racing drivers on the planet. Howard's previous film, Apollo 13, is not so much about a failed mission to the moon, but rather the interactions of three men who happen to be on a failed mission to the moon. In real life, the contrast between Hunt and Lauda's personalities was one of the things that made their real life rivalry so compelling. In the film, the contrast between Brühl's performance as the consistent, but stereotypically analytical Austrian, and Hemsworth's performance as the British playboy who is faster over a single lap than any other driver on the grid is what makes the film. The two have tremendous chemistry as adversaries, allowing the audience to believe that these actors actually dislike one another.
The focus on the rivalry between Hunt and Lauda, as well as their relationships with their significant others, uncovers one of the film's two greatest flaws. Despite the two hour length, the film could have easily used another 15 to 30 minutes of race action, because the race scenes were both visually and auditorily stunning, a marked contrast from recent racing films like Sylvester Stallone's 2001 film Driven, which has become a punch line amongst people in the racing community because of how bad it was. Another one of the film's major flaws is that it presented it as though Hunt was Lauda's equal in terms of ability. That may have been true over the course of a single lap, or in qualifying, but Formula One is not a sprint. The races can be two hours long, and a driver's ability is not just his raw speed, but his consistency, ability to keep his car from breaking down and manage his tires, car control (avoiding crashes), and his ability to make his team's car faster by sensing its flaws and relaying those flaws to the engineers on his team. Raw speed, while important especially in qualifying, is no good if a driver is unable to recognize his car's limits in terms of both performance and reliability during a race. Even if someone is the fastest driver on earth, he is useless if he has a tendency to push his car beyond the limit. James Hunt was demonstrably quicker over a single lap than Niki Lauda. He also abused his car, as demonstrated by his five retirements in 1976 compared to Lauda's three, one of which was made when the driver thought the race was too dangerous to continue. Racing twice may not seem like a lot, but in the races that Hunt did not finish, Lauda won three of them and finished fourth and second in the other two, gaining himself valuable championship points.
In real life, there is no doubt that Lauda was the superior driver. His three championships compared to Hunt's one speak volumes in that regard. While Lauda may not have had Hunt's gift of pace, he was a savant at preparing his car to run faster and staying out of danger while out on the track. If Rush fails greatly in any historical aspect, it's the volume of people who left theaters unsure of whether Lauda or Hunt was the better driver. Fortunately for Ron Howard and Hollywood, this film was meant to tell an entertaining story, and not present a documentarian account of historical events.
Andrew Ford is a senior English Major from Devon, Pennsylvania who is about to graduate from college after only two terms—Bush and Obama. He has been in an unrequited love affair with the New York Mets for as long as he can remember and can recite the movie Top Gun from memory.
