Retro style excitement...77.5+%

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2013)

I saw an ad for this film in the cinema foyer and I thought to myself that the man in the racing car looked like Niki Lauda. I had no idea who the good looking blonde driver was meant to be though. Maybe that comes into it. Anyway, turns out the ad was for a fact based dramatisation of actual Formula 1 racing car drivers...so, Daniel Brühl already has some credit in the bank for his portrayal of the multi-time world champion Formula 1 driver Niki Lauda. This movie got a good review on "At the movies" so that also made me more inclined to watch it. However, seeing Australian Chris Hemsworth as the "other" driver (James Hunt) in the clip for the movie on that TV show made me think that his English accent seemed quite contrived...sort of a clipped, aristocratic accent...I'm thinking ball park Prince Philip territory here! In any case, this wasn't so marked to me in the movie proper, so it wasn't a negative for me.
Especially early on, this movie has a sort of comic book feel to the proceedings...or perhaps "Boy's own adventure" is another way of saying this...perhaps a bit of a 1970s English movie feel to the movie as well...or swinging 1960s style. In other words, it seems pitched more as entertainment than gritty, realistic drama. Personally I found the racing in the movie lacked much detail, insight and intensity, but on occasion the racing presented was all those things...as when Niki Lauda weaves between F1 cars after coming back from the hospital.
Where the movie does hold great interest and drama is in the factual information presented to the audience via on screen text...i.e. who won a certain race or what the season leaderboard looks like. It's this aspect which makes the movie engrossing when the actual driving scenes don't. You're made aware of where Hunt stands in relation to Lauda in their fight for the F1 crown.
Also fascinating is the insight into the business of racing at this time in the sport's history. You see what Hunt and Lauda were doing before they made it into the big league of racing...their time in Formula 4 (I think it was "4").
Watching the movie, it occurred to me that it quite easily have been all about Niki Lauda and his journey. I can't say that I could have associated the name "James Hunt" with the phrase "champion F1 driver" but the movie is very informative in making a case for that proposition and justifies its approach of making the theme of this movie the rivalry between these two disparate drivers.
In creating an approach based on rivalry it also occurred to me that perhaps the movie fabricated the interactions between these two drivers. On screen, they appear to be in each other's pocket most of the time and I really couldn't believe it was like that in reality. However, at the end of the movie there was some archival footage of Hunt and Lauda chatting to each other at a racetrack, which makes me wonder if there is more truth in this movie than I thought.
That being said, there were many times when my credulity did not come easily. For instance, did Hunt really give that reporter an answer like to that to what the reporter asked Lauda at a press conference? Did that actually happen? Did Lauda really watch that on TV when he was receiving treatment? They had televisions in those rooms? Really? Those scenes make for good drama and narrative motivation, but still, I was wondering where truth ended and fiction began. To a lesser extent, I found it hard that Lauda accept the premise of the barbs Hunt would throw at him pre-race at times...surely, if that happened, Lauda would just ignore such a prat, right? If all this stuff happened though, than it is a terrific representation of the duality of Hunt's relationship to Lauda.
Overall, this movie is like a philosophical representation of two competing life philosophies...in the form of two extreme, polar opposite personalities. No doubt the middle ground between them would be the ideal in life...perhaps. It would be lovely to think that Hunt and Lauda did have their conversation at Lauda's jet inside the hangar as depicted in the movie. I also liked in that scene how Lauda puts into words something that I was thinking about Hunt's status. Whilst unsure of the actuality of the scene, I also liked how Hunt proffered some home truths to Lauda when the latter unsuccessfully tried to have a race cancelled due to rain.
Perhaps it was in "At the movies" where director Ron Howard admitted having doubts as to whether Chris Hemsworth had the acting chops to pull off this performance. I found Chris performance engaging but he also has a couple of scenes where he gives good reaction shots to the dramas he faces...he really 'inhabits that moment' so to speak.
"Rush" has a climactic race between Hunt and Lauda at the end of the movie. Initially I thought Lauda's action implied something, but on reflection I found it a cagey move perhaps worth the gamble, even if the movie posits an entirely different motive for his action.
Just in passing, I'll note that Niki Lauda did get referenced in a song by The Music Men on the audience performance segment of the TV show "Hey hey it's Saturday". Seeing this movie, it does now seem cruel in retrospect.
As mentioned in my opening paragraph, even though I am only slightly aware of F1 history and even less of James Hunt as a player in it, this movie does a sterling job of rectifying that situation.