Rush is all about forward momentum. For a movie about Formula One racing, that’s only fitting. The need for speed is built into the DNA of the real story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda, two successful F1 drivers who hit the scene during the 1970s. Ron Howard’s 2013 film largely focuses on the 1976 season, in which Hunt and Lauda went head to head for the championship title. (Although they raced against each other in Formula One from 1973 to 1979, the 1976 season was their closest matchup.) Rush dramatizes Hunt and Lauda’s famous rivalry, imagining each man as uniquely captivated by his chosen sport. Neither can see anything but the goal ahead of him, fixating so much on the win that everything else fades away. Rush emulates its protagonists’ mindset, and the film’s propulsive pace elegantly sweeps up the viewer in Hunt and Lauda’s obsessive pursuit.
Howard’s film exaggerates the enmity between Hunt and Lauda (played to perfection here by Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, respectively), turning what was, in real life, a friendship off the track into something closer to a love-hate relationship. The screenplay, written by Peter Morgan (who previously worked with Howard on the film adaptation of Frost/Nixon), presents the two drivers as opposites who simultaneously infuriate and complete each other. As direct competitors, Hunt and Lauda have the same objective: to be the Formula One World Champion. But the two men approach their shared goal with decidedly different philosophies, and Morgan’s script takes pains to carefully contrast Lauda’s calculated technique to Hunt’s passion and recklessness. Lauda pushes Hunt to take the craft of driving more seriously, and Hunt pushes Lauda to risk a little more on the track — all for the sake of beating each other, of course.
So far, so conventional. I suppose one’s reading of the film’s central relationship could end there, as it did for critic Claudia Puig when she wrote in her rave review that the film is an “ode to joyous rivalry.” This interpretation isn’t wrong, exactly, and the film’s final scene certainly implies that the Lauda character sees the story as such. According to his summary of the situation, given in the scene, he and Hunt have what would be familiarly called a “healthy rivalry” — the kind of lively competition based on respect that propels each party to achieve to their highest level. Lauda admits in the voiceover that closes the film that Hunt “was among the very few [of my opponents] that I liked, and even fewer that I respected,” solidifying this idea. Watching the whole film, however, it’s not entirely evident that Hunt and Lauda’s relationship as depicted is healthy or mutually beneficial.
Howard and Morgan treat the film’s central conflict with striking and deliberate ambivalence. It’s unclear to what extent the rivalry is a positive force in each man’s life and to what extent the rivalry serves as a pretext for Hunt and Lauda to indulge their own self-destructive impulses in the name of competition. The movie’s attitude toward its primary thematic subject remains compellingly unresolved to the very end, and, for this, I love it.
On one hand, the film refuses to trivialize or judge Hunt and Lauda’s ambitions, and the adrenaline-spiking racing sequences let the viewer in on the fun. The film keeps close to Lauda and Hunt, attempting to get the audience into their heads. Voiceover, extreme close-ups in the racing scenes, and a tightly focused plot give the audience little sense of the story outside of Hunt and Lauda’s perspectives. Rush operates at a high velocity, much like its leading characters, hurtling from plot point to plot point with hardly any room for contemplation. It’s intoxicating and entertaining as hell. And, all things considered, the film has a happy ending. Both men get what they want in one way or another. In real life, Hunt became a celebrity after the 1976 season, and Lauda went on to become an F1 legend.
On the other hand, Morgan’s script never loses sight of the ways that both men’s single-minded quest for excellence in their sport comes at a mental and emotional cost, even if Hunt and Lauda don’t necessarily see it themselves. Rush isn’t a movie about two men who ruin their lives in pursuit of their passion, but it would be a stretch to call Hunt and Lauda well-adjusted. I keep referring to Hunt and Lauda as a pair because they are, at heart, more alike than they are different. Neither man can imagine himself doing anything with his life other than Formula One racing. They both strongly feel that driving almost 200 miles per hour is the only talent they’ve been blessed with, as in one humorous scene, where Lauda tells his future wife Marlene (Alexandra Maria Lara), without a hint of irony, “God gave me an okay mind, but a really good ass, which can feel everything in a car.” As Hunt and Lauda frequently remind each other, they’re both assholes. Neither one can quite function in normal society.
Morgan weaves this understanding into his script, allowing the men’s deep similarities to eventually take center stage in spite of the antagonistic set-up. The film reveals itself as a portrait of two men living on the edge and struggling to rationalize the same irrational drive. Hunt lives every day like it’s his last, adopting a rockstar lifestyle that gives his death wish a sexy sheen of joie de vivre. Lauda accepts that there is, statistically, a twenty percent risk of death every time he competes in a race; he repeats the number as if it’s a mantra. He tries to play the numbers game when justifying his participation, as if this logical framing makes the risks he takes seem more sensible. Never mind that a sensible person would never accept a twenty percent risk of death on the job.
Throughout the film, both Hunt and Lauda use various personal failures and negative emotions as fuel for their obsession. From the beginning, Lauda sets out to be a winner to prove his grandfather (played by Hans-Eckart Eckhardt), who dismisses Formula One as a worthless occupation, dead wrong. Hunt vomits before every race. At one point, his team owner reassures an onlooker that it’s a good thing: “It means he’s stoked!” Later in the film, Hunt only starts winning races in the 1976 season after his first wife, model Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde), leaves him for Richard Burton. Most crucially, Lauda uses his loathing of Hunt as motivation to get back into his Ferrari after a horrific accident.
The sequence of events leading to Niki Lauda’s well-known accident at the Nürburgring during the 1976 German Grand Prix begins almost precisely in the middle of the film. In the movie’s version, Lauda proposes a boycott of the race among the drivers, due to unsafe weather conditions. Hunt rallies the drivers against Lauda, suggesting that the Austrian only wants to boycott the race to cement his lead in the season and make it impossible for anyone else to earn enough points to overtake him. When Lauda crashes, Hunt feels immensely guilty — but, apparently, uses that guilt as more reason to win, since he does well on the track while Lauda is out of commission.
To everyone’s astonishment, Lauda shows up at the Italian Grand Prix, his burned face still bandaged, to race six weeks after his accident. He is presumably in enormous pain but has apparently recovered enough to drive again. Hunt approaches Lauda before the race to apologize for “swaying the room” in Germany and to confess that “in many ways, I feel responsible for what happened.” Lauda curtly replies, “You were.” Without looking up, Lauda continues, “But trust me, watching you win those races, while I was fighting for my life [in the hospital], you were equally responsible for getting me back in that car.” Lauda meets Hunt’s gaze at the end of his proclamation; the camera cuts to Hunt’s face, and his expression doesn’t reveal whether Lauda’s assurance has relieved or further burdened him.
For the remainder of the film, Lauda repeatedly asserts that Hunt’s victories in his absence galvanized him to get back into his car and finish the season. But Lauda’s repetition of his claim that his rivalry with Hunt positively propelled him to return to racing starts to feel like another justification, just like the almost ritualistic reiteration of his twenty percent risk rule. After the crash, which serves as the film’s critical juncture, Lauda’s perspective slowly takes over the narrative. It’s Lauda who defines the value of his relationship with Hunt, and it’s Lauda who defines it as a healthy rivalry. He needs to see it that way to legitimize his own decisions and desires.
The section of the film in which the hospital-bound Lauda pushes himself to recover, all while he watches Hunt win race after race on the TV set in his room, isn’t strictly inspiring. Lauda’s determination is a little scary. When his wife catches him trying to put his racing helmet on over his burns, causing himself excruciating pain, he tells her, “I know what you’re thinking, but please… if you love me, don’t say a word.” This, ultimately, is what Morgan’s script does. It lets Lauda’s character have the final say, and it doesn’t condemn either Hunt or Lauda for not knowing how to live any other way. Howard and Morgan’s film recognizes that neither character could be fully satisfied if they stopped striving for greatness behind the wheel, despite the ways that they deny themselves contentment to achieve that greatness.
I find myself returning to Rush for the way it sympathetically shows the cycle of justification and reward that ambitious people endlessly go through. There’s a sort of delusion that needs to happen in order to constantly push yourself to the limit, regardless of the field you’ve chosen. One must constantly uphold the conviction that the hard, awful, sometimes dehumanizing experiences are worth it; but there’s immeasurable joy, validation, and satisfaction to be found in achievement, particularly for the goal-oriented person. The impetus to aim high and go for broke, when it genuinely comes from within oneself, can’t be ignored. By holding space for both views — that ambition fed by competitive rivalry can be both destructive and productive — Rush emerges as a fascinating, frustrating, and incisive reflection on finding the ever-elusive line between healthy and obsessive ambition.
