Busting Perceptions - Rush

I learned only a few months ago that this film was supposed to be a big deal. At first I was puzzled, since I could barely get through it the first time I watched it. My puzzlement turned to incredulity when I saw how militant people got while defending it, especially since most of their arguments made my case for me, and they had nothing but ad hominem attacks in response to my arguments against this sports biopic.

So, I decided to watch Rush again. Full disclosure - it didn't seem as awful as it did the first time, but honestly, that isn't saying much. I can understand why Formula One fans like, or even love this film, but what about the rest? I find it inexplicable that this film appeals so strongly to them. Sure, it has great "visuals" and the score is composed by Hans Zimmer. These two factors are generally enough to please the average viewer, which I can accept when there's a foundation of a half-decent screenplay, but that is not the case with Rush.

Admittedly, it is not easy to make a film about real people, based on real incidents that were well publicised, but I will repeat what I wrote about Argo - if you're spending millions of dollars to make a film that will be seen all around the world, do it right or not at all, for there are no participation trophies or consolation prizes at that level.

Diving right into it, the biggest problem with Rush is the seeming obsession with authenticity and historical accuracy (the reason I use the word 'seeming' will become clear later on). While F1 purists seek to justify this, they would do well to bear in mind that the vast majority of people who watched this film are not F1 fans, and director Ron Howard made it clear that he did not want Rush to be like a documentary and it was important that it catered to a wider audience, not to mention that authenticity and accuracy cannot be excuses for bad writing.

Right from the first act itself, it is clear that screenwriter Peter Morgan and Ron Howard intend to show us the supposedly important events in the lives of the two main characters - James Hunt and Niki Lauda - regardless of whether they belong in the narrative or not. Clay Regazzoni's warning to Lauda to stay away from a girl because he couldn't match up to her ex, Hunt, and Hunt's "meet-cute" with his future wife are examples of this, as they're nothing but dead spaces.

On the first viewing, I just could not stop thinking that it's almost as if they've chosen to re-enact incidents that actually took place instead of dramatising them. One of the biggest blunders a filmmaker could make is to believe that the audience wants to watch something "real", and give it exactly that. While I would not be so arrogant as to say that the audience has no idea what it wants, I would maintain that it cannot really articulate what it wants.

"Realism" is one of the most grossly misused words in reference to cinema. Reality is boring, and no one wants to watch it. A well written and well designed screenplay, no matter how "unreal", feels realistic, and that is what the audience really wants, not a re-enactment of something that once happened, unless of course, it's a case of truth being stranger than fiction, and let's face it, that's not something that happens everyday.

To illustrate my point, I'd like to draw attention to the rivalry between Hunt and Lauda. Not being an F1 enthusiast, I assumed that the portrayal of this rivalry in the film must've been quite accurate. I was wrong. The rivalry is fictional. Lauda and Hunt were friends, and even roommates for a while, and barring the fact that Hunt swayed the vote taken before the German Grand Prix in 1976, there is not the slightest hint of antagonism between the two.

When I learned this, I could not fathom what a writer could possibly have been thinking while writing this film. If the premise, the very foundation of your so-called biopic is fiction, why on earth would you not take more liberties to add to the drama?! How could you possibly think that after a century of narrative cinema, an audience would like to watch a rivalry which basically involves juvenile trash talk and tattling to the authorities, and eventually ends in friendship after one person almost dies? Bollywood did that 13 years ago in Josh, and that was a considerably better film.

Morgan and Howard probably assumed that audiences today were too brainwashed, too conditioned to really use their heads, which is why the film's core is a rivalry that is as hackneyed as it gets - the calculated vs the impulsive. This in itself would be acceptable, since there are only so many original ideas, but it is the way in which this conflict is portrayed that is unacceptable, i.e, the lame dialogue between Hunt and Lauda that the film is littered with, repeatedly telling us what we already know - that Hunt is willing to take risks that Lauda isn't, and also that Lauda apparently likes being called a rat.

There is also the matter of how the two main characters have been designed. Howard and Morgan have very amateurishly given us two characters that are two different ends of a horseshoe magnet - they seem like polar opposites, but are surprisingly close to each other. First, let's look at James Hunt. While it is obvious that his character cannot be as detailed and authentic as Lauda's, since no first hand research can be done, that does not mean that the character has to be a complete cliché.

The stereotype of the impulsive, rash, carefree, yet extremely gifted and likeable womaniser who needs a little discipline to get his act together and achieve the greatness he was destined for has been pelted at us for decades, in countless films and television shows, to the point that it is painfully boring to watch now, especially if it is copy-pasted like it has been done in this film.

I do not give two hoots about whether Hunt was like this in real life or not, and nor should I. What I want to see is a character that cannot be summed up in its entirety in a single scene, with everything after that being just a reiteration. What's even worse is that even though this particular stereotype implicitly promises the viewer a transformation so that the goals of the character can be achieved, no such thing happens in Rush. In fact, throughout the film, there is no obstacle in Hunt's path to the world championship that he overcomes.

Niki Lauda is supposedly the antithesis of Hunt. Due to the fact that Morgan, Howard, and Bruhl could do all the first hand research they wanted, this character ended up becoming too specific in all the wrong ways. Daniel Bruhl became the spitting image of Niki Lauda. You can hardly tell them apart, and if sources are to be believed, the accent and mannerisms that Bruhl adopted were exactly like Lauda's.

While it is impossible not to Laud (see what I did there?) the effort Bruhl and the rest of the team must've put in to make this character as authentic as possible, I can't help but think that they would've been better off investing their energies elsewhere. The wisdom of the ages tells us that excess of everything is bad. Moreover, there's a reason that one of the tenets of filmmaking in the Golden Age of Hollywood was not to draw any attention to any aspect of the filmmaking process.

It is impossible not to notice how much effort Bruhl put in to get the accent right. This is not a good thing for a multitude of reasons. One, as I said before, drawing too much attention to the effort being put in is not done. Two, getting an accent right should not be on the list of priorities while designing a character. Lauda's character barely has any depth, and despite the efforts to make it seem authentic, it is nearly as shallow as Hunt's.

Three, having an accent like that makes it pretty hard for the viewer to take anything he says seriously, especially when he keeps saying "asshole" like he does. And finally, if anyone feels that I'm completely wrong about all this, and Bruhl and the rest of the team putting in that much effort to make him seem exactly like Lauda is justified, there is a response to that as well.

Writing is about killing your favourite babies, and this can easily be applied to the entire process of filmmaking. If something in your film is so good that it sticks out and draws attention to how poor the rest of the film is, remove it, because uniformity of tone and quality is pretty important. One of the reasons why Hunt's character seems even more generic is that Lauda's seems too specific.

People keep saying that authenticity is important while making films like this in order to do justice to real people and events, but what they don't realise is that no biographical film can really be made without a few liberties, because what actually happened is of no consequence whatsoever if it's not dramatic enough. Howard and Morgan have taken liberties as well. Indeed, the central situation of this biopic is fiction. But they did not have the conviction to really take it all the way, and that resulted in the limp, boring, and clichéd mess that is Rush.

If anyone feels that drama can be sacrificed for authenticity, I would say that they might prefer to watch documentaries over fiction. If anyone feels that it is not possible to dramatise events any more than they have been in Rush, I would refer them to The Social Network, one of the best Hollywood films of the century so far, which is based not just on real people, but people who could probably buy Columbia Pictures three times over and turn it into their ping-pong rooms.