Dir. James Mangold
Ford v Ferrari is as fast-paced and sleek as the sports cars it centers around. And much like director James Mangold’s previous work, Logan, this movie has a cowboy spirit infused into it that can be felt even if horses have been replaced with horsepower. Much like Midway makes you feel the dizzying, vertigo-inducing forces experienced by a dive-bombing plane, this movie puts you in the driver’s seat until you can feel the speed. (I’m very curious about the Ford vs Ferrari 4DX experience.) The movie is well-shot, well-acted, and the plot itself kept me engaged; the main problem with this film is that I didn’t really care about the characters. For a movie based on real people, Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles (portrayed by Matt Damon and Christian Bale) still felt as though they’ve been made up. They’re so sharp, and talented and always right– they feel like they could only exist in fiction.
The name Ford vs Ferrari is slightly misleading. While the story is indeed kicked off by a feud between these titans of the car industry- they never talk to each other. They communicate by proxy once at the very beginning of the film and one good insult prods Henry Ford II to join the race car games. He hires retired driver and car designer Carroll Shelby (Damon) to design a Ford car that can beat Ferrari at the legendary 24-hour Le Mans race in France. Shelby recruits Ken Miles (Bale), a British race car driver and mechanic who is extremely talented but professionally limited by his lack of social skills (and crushing debt).
From this point we see very little of Ford and none of Ferrari until the 3rd act, at the race at Le Mans. Instead Damon and Bale are supervised by an absolute caricature of a bureaucratic weasel. Following an unpleasant run in with Miles earlier in the movie, Leo Beebe (possibly motivated by decades of unresolved trauma from children mocking his ridiculous name) becomes obsessed with getting rid of him no matter what damage that may do to the race car project. Beebe’s continuous undermining of Shelby and Miles is quite literally the only conflict in the whole movie. The way it’s presented in the film, it seems as though Shelby and Miles could have built this race car in a couple of months if only everyone had just listened to them. There’s a huge failure in the movie that’s transmitted entirely by radio and I would have liked to see it! You learn from mistakes and even for geniuses of car design, I want to see where they’ve grown from. Instead you mostly get a series of “Let’s try this” “…IT WORKED” scenes which are a lot less stimulating and fail to get me invested in their prospective success. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems that victory is inevitable.
Performance wise though, I have no complaints. Damon and Bale are individually good but wonderful together; much of the energy of the film comes from their snarky back and forth. Although they drive each other insane to the point of throwing punches, the closeness of their friendship is apparent. Past those two, everyone else puts forth a decent supporting performance. Miles’ wife, Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) is charming and has good chemistry with Bale but one scene with her left me so off put I just looked at her a bit sideways for the rest of the movie. It felt so out of step with how she’d been presented the rest of the movie, I was constantly holding my breath for a similar style freak out. I was very intrigued by Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) because he has such a great screen presence, but the movie wastes it by only having him standing silently for most of the few scenes he’s in.
In a post Fast and the Furious world, one would think we’ve mastered filming cars moving fast and furiously. But James Mangold’s direction puts you in the driver’s seat so you don’t just see the speed, you can feel it. It’s dizzying and things are flying at your face so you understand the remarkable talent required to keep a car under control when it’s moving that quickly. There’s constant tension over whether or not the car can sustain going 7000 RPM which is felt even by people like me who don’t know what that means.
Ford v Ferrari is a good time at the movies. It looks great, it moves quickly and all of the performances are high energy and engaging. For those two and a half hours, your only concern is how to make the car lighter, faster, and keep the brakes functioning. And it’s plain spoken enough for the vehicularly illiterate to follow along. But while I enjoyed it, I don’t think I’ll be thinking about this movie two weeks from now. I’m not going to stay up late thinking about its storytelling or wondering how I’d gotten this far in life without hearing about this very important story the way I did with Hidden Figures or The Imitation Game (Used here as examples of popularizing relatively unknown stories, not necessarily historical accuracy). Even though The Social Network ended up being a recount of the first act of a horror movie we still can’t escape, it has a resonance that I can’t imagine this movie will ever have. But for a good time at the theater, I definitely recommend the fast car go vroom movie.
