Go Speed Racer

Hemsworth and Brühl (right) rev their engines in Rush.

««1/2  Rush.  Written by Peter Morgan. Directed by Ron Howard. At area theaters.

Give the makers of Rush credit for one thing: they know that mere excellence isn't enough to make compelling sports drama. Periods of dominance by any one figure or team are boring. It's rivalries that really sell tickets, from baseball (e.g., Yankees vs. Red Sox), tennis (Federer vs. Nadal), or basketball (Lakers vs. Celtics). Chances are that nobody today dwells too much on who won the Formula One World racing championship way back in 1976. But in Rush, director Ron Howard and Co. bet that you'll will care if you know that the title was contested by two bitter rivals, British prodigy/playboy James Hunt vs. his Austrian frenemy, Niki Lauda. Like Achilles and Hector—or Maverick and Ice Man—it's the struggle for supremacy that makes the story, not the prize.

          Some sports have had their movie classics, but auto racing isn't one of them. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan hope to defy that history by making a rarity among big-budget Hollywood opuses: an unabashedly character-driven drama. Chris Hemsworth (Thor) plays Hunt pretty much to his reputation: a sunny, likeable guy who was a daredevil on the track and a womanizing booze-hound away from it. That he had any time for racing was a miracle in itself, given that British Airways stewardesses were delivered en masse to his hotel rooms, and he reportedly slept with five thousand different women in his forty-five year lifetime (assuming he started at fifteen years old, that's a brand new lover every other day, sports fans). Of course, this is a Ron "Opie" Howard movie we're speaking of here, so Rush is happy to wink, wink at the sex and drinking, but overlook Hunt's heavy use of weed and blow—sometimes mere moments before he climbed behind the wheel.

          Daniel Brühl's Niki Lauda is actually far more interesting. The scion of a Vienna banking dynasty, the real Lauda defied his family to take up racing. He was notoriously prickly character, brilliant with cars but flummoxed by people. Where Hunt laughed in the face of danger, Lauda got out his slide rule, endeavoring to limit his risk to 20% "and not one percent more". His social skills were questionable, but never his grit: after a fiery crash in Germany that seared him outside and in, he was back in the cockpit a mere six weeks later, racing to hold off Hunt for the world championship. Though this is his first major role, Brühl got the hardest job—making us care about someone even his closest colleagues called an "asshole."

          Rush fails to reach top gear, but it isn't the fault of the leads. From Cocoon to Apollo 13 to The Da Vinci Code, words come to mind to describe the Ron Howard aesthetic, such as competent and workmanlike. This is particularly unfortunate given the gut-wrenching spectacle that auto racing could present, in the right hands. In his classic boxing drama Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese did not just settle for a compelling character, but re-imagined the sport visually, from the inside out. By contrast, Howard never shows us something new. He never even gives us a plain, uninterrupted view of what it's like to steer around a Formula One track for more than four seconds, resorting instead to cliché, MTV-style jump-cutting. Stylistically, there's nothing here that Tony Scott didn't do two decades ago in Days of Thunder.

          It's tempting to think that Ron Howard the director, who grew up before America's eyes acting in shows like The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, simply can't think his way out of his middle-brow box. Perhaps that's unfair to his intelligence. In any case, Rush doesn't take the checkered flag.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro