Plot
In the middle of the swinging 70s, with Formula 1 on the cusp of becoming an advertiser’s favourite plaything, two longtime adversaries are squaring off. After blooding each other in Formula 3, hedonist British playboy James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and calculating, reserved Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) are at the top of their game and the apex of their venomous rivalry, competing tooth and nail for the 1976 Formula 1 World Championship with potentially ruinous consequences.
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| A secret love story. |
Formula 1 has had a bit of a torrid time at the cinema; it isn’t a sport that naturally translates to the big screen in any obvious way. It drowns under technical jargon, is intrinsically off-putting to the uninitiated and somehow manages to be both very repetitive and brainmeltingly eclectic at the same time. In short: a filmmaker’s nightmare.
Not for steady-hand Ron Howard however. Any man who knows his way around a spaceship, as he demonstrated with Apollo 13, is apparently a dab hand with racing cars too. Though the racing sections are truly less than half of Rush – and suffer a tad from genre staples; everybody loves a montage – Howard has left no stone unturned in his quest to deliver an impassioned and respectable account of the ups, downs and boundless energy of the sport. If there’s anywhere else where that man could have stuck a camera, it’ll take a very brave person to find it. It’s fantastic, varied and masterful filmmaking, thrilling for fans and non-fans of the sport alike.
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| This isn't from the film, this is just what happens when Chris Hemsworth walks around. |
It’s been a heavy duty summer for balls-to-the-wall action and CGI orgy apocalypses and yet, in terms of stripped back simplistic drama and pure cinematic excitement, Rush threatens to out-do them all. The 70s were just that kind of era I guess. With a rarely seen technical proficiency and top-drawer editing (which should find itself challenging for the big bucks come the end of the year if there’s any justice in the world), Rush’s racing sequences are breathless, manic, frightening and purely exhilarating in equal measure. It’s about as close as one could get to feeling like they’re a part of the race without strapping into a vehicular coffin themselves and in that sense Howard has more than delivered. Good thing really, it does all seem a tad unsafe and burny.
Rush is a technical home run, the cinematography, clothing, attitude and hell, even the colours, coalesce into something far more than an image on screen; they become a window through time. Yes, with enough money and time anybody could recreate a period, but what Rushdoes differently is absolutely love every bloody minute of it. It’s undeniable in its attractiveness – as indeed the film tongue-in-cheek points out; no sooner has Hunt been in a crash than he’s shagging Natalie Dormer’s Nurse Gemma nine ways to Sunday – and utterly addictive.
The gung-ho, machismo racing is only the lesser part of Rush however. This is a biopic after all and a biopic it certainly is, following the tried and tested formula of tracking its protagonists’ interrelated lives up to their climactic collision. For every which way Hemsworth’s Hunt is a smooth posho with too much time, money and charm to know what to do with, Brühl’s Lauda is unsocial, calculating and driven (snrk). They’re the veritable two-sides-of-the-same-coin, and while your alliance may seem obvious at first, the characters are written and performed in such an infectious way that ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ do not come so easily. What does come easily however is pure enjoyment at a film crafted by one of the industry’s finest craftsmen and delivered by two actors at the very top of their game.
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| Again, not the film. Just an average Tuesday for Hemsworth. |
Rush doesn’t get everything right. The scene with Hunt and his little punchy-punchy with the reporter is bizarrely mismanaged and the Despairing Wives Club are more than a little underdeveloped, barely getting a look-in from behind whatever screen happens to be nearest. But, truthfully, it hardly seems to matter. This is Hemsworth and Brühl’s film and they own it from start to finish, overcoming clunky voiceovers to deliver deliciously detailed characters who actually change and evolve in ways that are both poignant and believable. A tragic rarity.
While it may seem an ostensibly by-the-books biopic by way of a sports movie, it goes far deeper than that and, though trying not to put too much of a vague and irritating philosophical edge on things, Rush addresses the ‘human condition’ with far more skill than more overtly thinky and self-congratulating films out there. What revs off as a film about two men dealing with a whirlwind rivalry transforms, by the time the final credits role, into something far more affecting: people dealing not with each other, but with themselves, their own essence of life. The dramatic beats may not be exactly subtle, instead dealt with broad strokes and sometimes needlessly expositional dialogue, but it's testament to the ability of Hemsworth and Brühl that it works.
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| Meanwhile, Brühl has liver and onions for diner again. |
Verdict
As sleek as the vehicles it fawns over, Rush is a pristinely crafted film that does all it sets out to do and more. Equal parts bombastic, funny and dramatic, it’s technical brilliance is matched only by the remarkable turns of Messrs.’ Hemsworth and Brühl.
5/5
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