The 70s have been good to Ron Howard. His starring role in George Lucas' 1974 film American Graffiti turned heads, and his lead role in the popular television series Happy Days, that ran throughout the 70s, made him a household name. One of his most successful and acclaimed films to date, Apollo 13, was based on events that took place in 1970.
It seems fitting, then, that he should revisit the era of bellbottom pants and shaggy haircuts, which also happened to be the setting for one of the most fascinating rivalries in the history of Formula One racing: the 1976 World Driver's Championship, which was contested by Englishman James Hunt of McLaren Racing and Austrian Niki Lauda of Scuderia Ferrari. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, in dramatizing this rivalry, have created one of the best movies this year, and one of the best movies involving motor racing in, well, ever.
The story begins at one of the most pivotal points of the '76 season, the beginning of the 1976 German Grand Prix, with Lauda (played brilliantly by German actor Daniel Bruhl) sitting in his Ferrari race car and observing his championship rival Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) across the racing grid, making his preparations. Lauda does a brief voiceover narration, and the story flashes back to six years earlier. Hunt and Lauda meet while racing in Formula 2, in a "feeder series" to Formula One, where their rivalry is instant, and intense. As the story unfolds, it emerges that they have a lot in common, more than just their passion and skills for racing cars. Both of them come from affluent families that do not support their racing dreams, and both of them are colossal egomaniacs. Of the two of them, however, Lauda is somewhat more proactive; he buys his way into the top tier of racing, Formula One, by taking out a loan and buying heavily into a team that is on its last legs. His ability to set up the car and make it go faster endears him to Swiss teammate Clay Regazzoni (Pierfrancesco Favino), a former driver for the world famous Scuderia Ferrari who, when invited to return to the Italian team, takes Lauda along with him. Hunt, meanwhile is able to get into F1 when his friend and backer, Lord Alexander Hesketh (Christian McKay) decides to enter his own team, albeit without corporate sponsorship. It is also at this point that Lauda and Hunt meet women who will prove pivotal to their lives, with Lauda meeting his future wife Marlene Knaus (Alexandra Maria Lara) and Hunt meeting his wife, model Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde) just before the 1975 season. Their fortunes vary from this point; Lauda wins the F1 championship, while Hunt's team, unable to secure sponsorship, has to pull out, leaving Hunt without a drive for the next year. However, at the last minute Hunt is able to secure a drive with the McLaren team, which has the only car fast enough to beat Lauda's Ferrari, thus setting the stage for one of the most memorable season-long rivalries in the history of motorsport.
Prior to this film, the last full-length feature film that Hollywood had made about Formula One was John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Grand Prix, which I have on DVD. Sylvester Stallone attempted to secure the rights to make an F1-themed film but was turned down by F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, as a result of which, the 2001 film Driven was set against the now-defunct Champ Car series. It was just as well, too; that movie was so bad that it would not have done F1 any favors as a marketing tool. Three years ago, Working Title, the company responsible for producing this film, came up with the documentary Senna. Rush is the first feature film that has been produced about F1 in nearly 50 years, and therefore something of a milestone.
Director Howard, who confessed to not knowing anything about Formula One prior to making this film, may have seemed an odd choice to direct it, but watching the painstaking recreation of the era and the races I would hardly have guessed he was an F1 novice. The racing scenes, are extremely well-presented using a skillful blend of stunt driving and computer-generated imagery, although they do not quite have the balls-to-the-wall verisimilitude that makes Grand Prix a classic among racing fans. I suppose, though, that this is inevitable considering that in 1966 safety concerns, either in the world of racing or film-making, were not as paramount as they are today. What I found remarkable about this film was how incredibly rich it was in terms of character development, something on which Grand Prix basically skimped, with the paper thin plot and characters basically serving as an excuse to string together the bravura racing sequences.
When I heard this movie was getting made I felt a touch of apprehension; how, I wondered, does one capture the drama of an entire F1 season (the 1976 season had 16 races) in a two-hour feature film? I was also a little worried that, with a British writer crafting the screenplay and a Hollywood up-and-comer (Hemsworth) playing Englishman Hunt, that Lauda's character, an Austrian with a funny accent, would be reduced to playing a generic Euro-nasty "villain" next to Hunt's "hero." After all, Senna, a documentary, had been criticized by many for its somewhat one-sided portrayal of rivalry between the late Brazilian firebrand Ayrton Senna and Frenchman Alain Prost in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A feature film, with a script and actors, would be much more vulnerable to slanted storytelling than a documentary.
Upon watching the film, I was happy to learn that my fears were unfounded; Working Title may have used Hemsworth's face on the posters but this movie belonged in equal measure to Hunt and Lauda. In fact, the Lauda role gets meatier as the story progresses, and he even has the distinction of opening and closing the film with a bit of voice-over narration.
It's worth pointing out the difference between Hemsworth's and Bruhl's performances, which feel as different as the approaches to racing of their characters. Hemsworth, whose Hunt is really not all that different from the character for which he is most famous, the superhero Thor, didn't have to alter his acting too much, and about the only major adjustment he had to make in terms of his performance was to drop a few f-bombs and take off his shirt a lot (and sometimes, a bit more than that). Still, he milked his movie-star charisma for everything it was worth in this role; if Thor was a mythological god, Hunt was, in those days, a god of sorts in his own right, and Hemsworth portrayed that to near perfection. He also captured a great deal of Hunt's insecurity and vulnerability as well.
Bruhl's performance, however was simply in a different league from Hemsworth's. I remember him as the genteel, French-speaking Nazi sniper from Inglourious Basterds, which made his transformation into the abrasive Austrian racing legend, even when aided by some pretty convincing prosthetics, all the more striking. Even more striking was how he managed to uncover the humanity in a character who seemed so determined to shed it. Neither Hunt nor Lauda was a particularly likable character in this film, but while Hunt's roguish charm made him the sort of person whom people tend to like even when they shouldn't, Lauda, at least as depicted in the film, was basically the person most people would love to hate in real life. Bruhl, in short, had a taller mountain to climb than Hemsworth in terms of getting the audience to connect with his character, but if I'm any judge, he most certainly managed to reach the very top. I've always sucked at predicting awards or even awards nominations but I seriously hope this guy at least finds himself in contention for some gold later this year and early next year.
Still, as much as this film belongs to the lead actors, this is still Ron Howard's show, and it marks a welcome return to form for him after a few creative missteps over the years. To my mind, this is his best film since Apollo 13. The energy with which he infuses this film, which could so easily have gone wrong in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, is infectious; everyone single one of his collaborators here, from cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to film editors Mike Hill and Dan Hanley to composer Hans Zimmer, is firing on all cylinders. The grainy, 70s-style cinematography puts the viewer right in the moment, as do the incredible, if slightly clipped racing scenes, and the swelling, cello-heavy score is some of the most stirring music that Zimmer has written in years.
Yes, like all historical dramas, the film takes certain liberties with what really happened, but there is nothing here as egregious as the wholly contrived airport chase in last year's Argo (a film I also enjoyed thoroughly), and as far as I can tell, in no instance was the truth completely butchered just to drive along the story. I could be wrong, but considering that a lot of people from the F1 community, including no less than F1 head Ecclestone and even Lauda himself, have given this movie the thumbs-up, I don't think I am.
I'll admit that I wanted to like this movie walking into the theater, but it's quite rare that a movie I have wanted to see as much as I wanted to see this film managed to be everything I was hoping for and more. The best part is that my wife, who could not really give a damn about Formula One but for my personal addiction to it, thoroughly enjoyed this film, as I think many non-F1 fans will.
People may have had to wait nearly five decades for a proper film about Formula One, but Ron Howard and his cast and crew have definitely made Rush worth that wait.
5/5
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