Adrenalin Addicts.

Rating: 7/10 (11 November 2014)

This may be Ron Howard's best film. It's certainly his most adult. Usually, Howard's work is cunningly commercial. No smoking on the screen because we don't want to set a bad example and somebody in the audience might be offended. Internal demons are overcome. Happy endings follow.
"Rush" is a lot more textured than that, and Howard's directorial devices are muted but effective. Not a lot of time is given over to off-track romances. A couple meet and spend a few minutes together, then there is a cut to their marriage, sparing the viewer the agony of indecision and uncertainty and sobs. That comes later, but again it's just as quickly over with. And there are surprising grace notes. Before a more than usually dangerous race, there is the brief silhouette of a particularly venomous looking spider crawling in that deliberate spiderly way down a vertical surface. Just a second or two. More would have cheapened the shot. Less would have shrieked "egomania".
The tale, of course, is based on a true 1976b story of rivalry between two Formula I racing car drivers -- Chris Hemsworth, an English playboy with long blond hair, and Daniel Brühl, an ambitious Austrian with a face like a garden gnome.
Immediately, we like Hemsworth and dislike Brühl. Hemsworth is more handsome and has a more immediately appealing personality. It's a tribute to the director and the writer, Peter Morgan, that over time, as we get to understand both men better, they cross the finish line in a tie.
The racing scenes are kept within bounds, sometimes skipped entirely and announced on TV or read about in a newspaper. The balance is just about right. And so is the explicitness of Brühl's injuries and the pain of his recovery. They aren't dwelt on or milked for a cheap gush of sympathy.
The two women mainly involved with Hemsworth and Brühl need to be mentioned. Olivia Wilde is stunning in a felinesque way. Her birth surname is Cockburn and the family includes a number of well-known journalists and diplomats. She has dual citizenship with the US and Ireland, which perhaps explains why she is able to pull off her Brit accent with such conviction. She's the model who marries Hemsworth and divorces him to run off with Richard Burton.
Alexandra Maria Lara meets Brühl by accident and they're quickly married. She's extraordinarily beautiful but in a quite different way from Wilde. Wilde radiates sexuality. She might consume you. But Lara, both in appearance and demeanor, suggests a gentler kind of love, quieter, less demonstrative, less feral, more nurturing. The women match the men they marry very well.
It's a well done picture, not part of the usual Hollywood effluvium.