The Fast and the Fastidious

I don’t know much about cars, but even I know Ford is largely considered a joke. And granted, in spite of its title, Ford v. Ferrari knows that. It takes a lot of pot shots at the Ford Motor Company, both in the blandness, predictability, and lack of ambition in their cars, as well as the greed and stubbornness of their leadership, personified by a nasty Tracy Letts and a vindictive Josh Lucas. That’s not exactly unusual though in a film that is positing them, and by extent America, as an underdog. Oh, Christian Bale may be relentlessly mocking their capabilities of creating a race car now, but by the end of the movie they’ll have won the Le Mans 24 hour international race. We’ve been through this before.

But the curious thing about James Mangold’s movie about the creation of the Ford GT40, the lead-up to and ultimate victory at the aforementioned race, is that it seems to have no loyalty to Ford whatsoever. Rather it’s about characters –Ken Miles specifically: the crusty and crass British driver named by designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) the only man who could race and win in a Ford car. His story and Bale’s performance as him is largely what gives the movie life. Though the character is in some ways underdeveloped (it’s often referenced but never much expanded on that Miles is a veteran who participated in the Normandy landings), and he is mostly characterized as the typical anti-authoritarian radical whose image and manner come into conflict with Ford’s corporate synergy (the phrase “not a team player” gets unsurprisingly tossed out), Bale imbues him with an energy, attitude, and passion wholly his own. It’s another modestly transformative performance (both impressive and concerning given how soon it is after Vice), but one that’s complimented by a humanist portrait of a man in an uncomfortable financial situation who experiences something distinctly transcendent when he races –there’s a poetic moment where he describes how the adrenaline rush of driving incredibly fast is as “a body moving through space and time”. And he’s endeared even further through his grounding relationships with a relatable Caitriona Balfe as his wife and a starry-eyed Noah Jupe as his son. By contrast, Damon, the other star of the film, continues to play roughly the same variation on his own celebrity as he has in most of his movies since The Martian –affable and reliable, yet innocuous.

The relationship between these two characters, their friendly enmity is propped up as the backbone of a lot of this movie, though it isn’t particularly strong. And so we’re left with the intermittently interesting process of the creation of the innovative car, broken up by the occasional digression into Fords’ micro-managing and Shelby’s manipulation of the upper crusts. Mangold is a smart storyteller however, keeping the conventionally exciting and dramatic moments always nearby amidst all the engineering talk and exasperatingly hyperbolic language about “going to war” over cars, even as the movie stretches long into the over two hour mark. When he does finally reach the racing sequences, there’s more than enough going on (both narratively and visually) to keep your attention and distract from any cynicism a viewer like me may have over the supposed dramatic urgency of one automobile beating another.

Starting with a trial at Daytonna to prove the muster of Miles and the GT40, Ford v. Ferrari’s race scenes are consistently thrilling and sensational, living up to Miles’ passion for the sport and his romantic experience of the race.  Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (shooting the movie to a similarly rich and golden veneer as Tarantino and Robert Richardson on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -though less saturated in 60s iconography) make the most of the night scenes especially, at times even creating something of a mellow atmosphere amidst the tension and harried pace of such a contest. And both the Daytonna race and Le Mans feel incredibly important, given the grand scale and visuals the filmmakers employ.

Of course the film is a nostalgia vehicle as much as anything else. It’s one of the few wide-release movies this year with a target demographic of older Gen-X to boomer men, what with its glorification of the heyday of car racing and its reaffirmation of the American ideals and relative optimism of the period –even as expressed through British immigrants. Where Once Upon a Time in Hollywood basks in the aesthetics of the 1960s, Ford v. Ferrari is more about the feelings. It doesn’t look like a lot of similar period pieces, it doesn’t even go all out with the retro cars –which outside of the central vehicle aren’t really shot or spoken of with much importance (Ferrari is in the title too, but those cars are barely seen before the climax). It’s a film designed to evoke a white middle-class feel-good optimism and marvel at American innovation, so that while it isn’t as explicitly corporate as it may seen with the title it has, it’s still a quintessentially American movie, and one with dubious resonance now.

But Ford v. Ferrari is perfectly fine for what it is: a reasonably good and sometimes engaging racing movie that may be too long for its own good, but is saved by Bale’s strong leading performance and some technical achievements that put it a step above some of the duller entries in this subgenre (it’s certainly better than any of Pixars’ Cars movies for example) -which seems to only make sense with the talents it has at the helm. James Mangold after all, made the signature conventional and safe music biopic of the 2000s with Walk the Line; it’s perfectly fitting then that he would make the signature conventional and safe racing biopic of the 2010s as well.

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