In one of the interviews with the director of La Flor, a 13 hour Argentinan movie, the film maker extols the virtues of old-time Hollywood B movies -- she says that she aspired to make the kind of modest, entertaining thriller that Hollywood "used to make in their sleep but can't produce today." This remark applies to James Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari (2019), the kind of formulaic high-budget star-driven action film that Hollywood used to make without any apparent effort fifty years ago but can't quite get right in the 21st century. The picture starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, both immensely charismatic, is ostensibly about the rivalry between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari with respect to designing and building race cars sufficiently well-tooled to be competitive at LeMans, the famous 24 hour race in France. The picture involves all sorts of conflicts that, of course, must be resolved in the course of the furious action at the race-track: Matt Damon and Christian Bale quarrel, at times violently over various issues, Henry Ford II vows revenge on Enzo Ferrari when the Italian insults him by proxy, the corporate suits battle the rugged individualist driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and so forth. But the movie is fatally lacking in its convictions with respect to these conflicts and, in fact, the narrative, which seems slavishly bound to facts about which only hardcore gearheads care. consistently subverts these conflicts. In the end, the picture seems, more or less, a muddle. In old Hollywood, the screenwriters would have fictionalized everything but a few names, would have combined characters into effective composites, and would have made sure that the film was thematically coherent -- but Mangold and company can't quite pull this off. The result is an oddity: the movie is designed like an old fashioned Hollywood epic and has a distinctly retrograde feeling (in particular, the role played by Ken Miles' spunky wife would have seemed conservative in 1955; and,, further, the part played by Miles' adoring son would have seemed old school in the era of D. W. Griffith), but the director complicates things unnecessarily, make the film too long, and can't bring the picture home (or across the finish line to use car-race imagery) without confusing things and leaving the audience to wonder what exactly the director is trying to convey. The movie is reasonably entertaining, primarily because of the star power of Damon and Bale, but, in the end it's not nearly as good as it should be.
Ford v. Ferrari has a simple enough premise. Ken Miles is a tough British race-car driver, apparently a bit embittered by his experiences in W. W. II -- he doesn't like Germans and refuses to drive for Porsche. Miles is a hard-nosed individualist, a role that seems a little odd, because he is required to play against Matt Damon, a successful former race-car driver sidelined by health issues. (He has something wrong with his heart and chugs a bottle of pills from time-to-time to illustrate his malaise.) Damon playing Shelby Carroll wears a big cowboy hat, speaks with a Texas drawl, and seems to be the character that we would expect to adopt the John Wayne stance in this movie -- the rugged cowboy who can't be coerced. But, in fact, Damon plays his part cautiously, throughout about half of the film, he's a pawn of the suits and, in fact, even betrays his brother driver, Ken Miles, on one occasion. (This is an example of bad screenwriting based upon adherence to facts no one knows or cares about -- Carroll is told to not let Miles drive in the first LeMans competition and, in fact, accedes to corporate pressure. This results in everything happening more or less twice: Carroll betrays Miles in the first race, but stand behind him in the second race. This lengthens the film but doesn't improve it. In Old Hollywood, the conflict would have been worked out in one race at the climax and not involved two iterations of the LeMans contest. Another example of screenwriting incompetence is the development of two corporate villains Lee Iacocca and some other bad guy named Leo -- this is just bad scripting: there's no reason the two villains couldn't be combined into a composite figure representing big corporate wickedness; again, at this moment in history, no one alive cares whether Lee Iacocca was a bad guy or not -- but the film pointlessly complicates this issue.) Henry Ford II is not doing well -- he gives a Patton-like speech to his assembly line workers (this is utterly ridiculous) and, then, send Iacocca to Modena to buy Ferrari -- the company is facing bankruptcy. Iacocca gets duped by Ferrari who makes some flamboyant insults against Henry Ford II ("ugly little cars made in ugly factories"). Henry Ford II vows to bury Ferrari at LeMans and, then, the film slides into the always pleasing narrative of the heroes putting together a team to best the Italian car-maker on the race-track. Although Ken Miles is unnecessarily abrasive and not a good corporate representative, he is the best man for the job at LeMans and, after the misfire of the first race (when he is betrayed by Shelby Carrroll) gets to prove his mettle on the race-track in France. There are two long racing sequences, one at Daytona and the other at LeMans. Shelby Carroll has been appointed the head of the American racing team and is responsible for developing the cars that ultimately prevail in France -- he spends the middle half of the film feuding ineffectually with the businessmen in Detroit about whether the obnoxious Miles should be allowed to drive the race car. Although the script is weirdly convoluted, when, in fact, the issues are pretty simple -- the cars go around in a big circle and the one that goes around fastest wins -- the build-up to the races, the technical details as to engineering the race car, and the duel between Ford and Ferrari are well done. Unfortunately, the film seems to forget its own title during the middle ninety minutes -- in that part of the movie, the film is really about the clash between the cautious corporate businessmen (whom Miles has insulted) and the rugged individualist drivers and their crews. The whole Ford v. Ferrari premise goes by the wayside for more then half of the movie -- nonetheless things hand together reasonably well. (It's always a bit rich to view a big budget Hollywood film, seemingly scripted by a committee, attacking corporations for their cowardice, when the film itself embodies the same compromises denounced by the script.)
During the climactic race, things go haywire. First, the American team cheats to defeat the Italians -- Carroll steals their stop watches and, then, drops a lug nut near their pit, apparently, to make them think they didn't get the tires on one of their cars properly. (This plot point is left pretty unclear.) More egregiously, the Americans exploit a loophole in the rules to change-out their brake assemblies in their entirety, something that seems questionable and that defeats the whole concept of the Americans winning fair-and-square because their car is better engineered and built. Second, the entire theme involving individualism versus corporate group-think gets muddied at the climax. Ken Miles is told to "slow down" so all three Ford race-cars can cross the finish line simultaneously -- this costs him his victory. He does this -- an act of self-abnegation that the film seems to celebrate. But doesn't this vindicate the men in the grey-flannel business suits? And, therefore, doesn't this celebration of corporate teamwork undercut the entire theme of the film? (And what's with the weird sun-flare on the lens in the penultimate scene shot on desert test-track -- the flare looks exactly like the Chevrolet logo? What is this supposed to mean? If its just a random mistake, it's mighty odd.) The racing scenes are the worst thing in the film -- they are, more or less, dull. The races involve lots of close-ups of Christian Bale squinting at the road, quick inserts of his tachometer and his foot on the pedal; sometimes, we get a shot of him shifting gears -- this is interspersed with interminable repetitive shots of the race cars hurling either to or away from the camera. The staging of the race scenes is both repetitive and unimaginative to boot -- furthermore, unless you're a motorhead, the viewer doesn't know how these races are conducted. The film posits the LeMans 24 hour race as the ultimate test of man and machine -- but the drivers, apparently, only drive the vehicles in four-hour shifts and, so, for half the race the hero, Ken Miles, is sleeping. (We don't find this out until the climactic race). This also undercuts Miles' achievement -- someone else drove half the race, and, therefore, doesn't that driver who is scarcely seen and scarcely named deserve half the credit for the victory? Old-style racing movies of this generally showed a couple of brutal and fatal accidents in the first hour or so -- therefore, sharpening suspense and upping the stakes for the final race. Mangold is too sophisticated for this strategy -- he deliberately de-emphasizes the danger involved in the races, a bold approach to a movie like this, but ultimately a choice that subverts the film. Finally, the movie is full of shots of Shelby Carroll and Ken Miles driving like maniacs on quiet residential boulevards or through small California cities -- these shots are simply infuriating. By what right, do these race-car drivers threaten others on public highways with their antics. How are we supposed to respond to one of the heroes, for instance, making a u-turn in city traffic and nearly causing a half-dozen wrecks. Are we supposed to applaud this audacity. I was appalled.
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