Chris Hemsworth, fresh from his title role in 2011’s
Thor, plays Hunt with an apparent superpower for attracting female
admiration. The film opens with him effortlessly seducing the nurse who
attends to his injury following a brawl over another man’s wife, and
thereafter it’s full-pelt ahead.
Through races (first backed by the eccentric Lord Hesketh), champagne
celebrations, girls, rivalry with the Austrian driver Niki
Lauda, marriage to the statuesque model Suzy Miller, more girls,
drink, divorce, sponsorship by McLaren, and the headlong pursuit of the 1976
Formula 1 world championship title. The nurse disappears early on: by the
time we forget about her, Hunt is already a tiny point in the distance.
Hemsworth, an Australian, plays Hunt with an impeccable English accent and a
mixture of charm, arrogance, lurking despair and authentically feral
sexuality. One suspects that ordinary life and Hunt do not sit well
together: he craves perpetual motion, and he finds in motor-racing what
similar personalities sometimes discover in war.
He’s all golden luck and perfect accident, the opposite of his hard-working,
studious rival Lauda (Daniel Brühl), for whom faith in discipline and
technology paves the road to success.
I’ll admit that, to some extent, Rush had me at hello: I can rarely resist an
opportunity to plunge back into the Seventies, and this film recreates it
with some verve and the necessary dash of cheap glamour.
Voluptuous women in heavy eyeshadow are rife, and the undisputed queen of them
is Suzy Hunt (Olivia Wilde), who had the panache to cuckold the permanently
unfaithful James by running off with Richard Burton.
Women are superfluous to the central passion of the film, however, which is
about the intense personal rivalry between Hunt and Lauda, spurring each
other on to greater risks and achievements. As a study in obsessive
animosity, it is a powerful one (Brühl, in a superb performance, slowly
reveals the honourable strength beneath his character’s brusque, blunt
exterior).
It’s a pity that this element is essentially fraudulent: although rivals on
the track, Hunt and Lauda were close friends in real life, whereupon the
film’s notion of a “brofeud” (the opposite of a bromance, but every bit as
sustaining) collapses.
Does such historical truth matter? I think it does, and it was perhaps a
mistake for the director and screenwriter Peter
Morgan to make this element the pillar that props up the story.
Still, the thrill of Rush is to be found not in reflection but in the
experience – a philosophy that reflects Hunt’s own thinking – and the final Grand
Prix scenes, filmed in lashing rain, are immensely exciting.
I can’t even drive, but sitting still in the cinema, I felt dizzy: I never
travelled so fast in all my life.