RACING TO THE FINISH IN FORD V FERRARI
TWO MEN, ONE REALLY FAST CAR IN FORD V FERRARI
ON THE SURFACE, Ford v Ferrari is about just that: the rivalry between the two titular car makers, each vying to win the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race. But in truth the latest epic from director James Mangold (Logan, Walk the Line) is less about battling the Italian race car giant, and more about fighting for independence, vision and creativity.
The film focuses on the men who helped the American company build the Ford GT40, the first American-made race car to truly challenge the Italian racing giant. Those men are Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a former racer who starts his own automobile manufacturer after a heart condition forces him into retirement, and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a supremely talented racer and class-A curmudgeon. Their sometimes testy partnership – marked by a begrudging respect for each other’s craft – is as fun to watch as the race sequences themselves.
Those scenes – filmed on state-of-the-art camera rigs without the assistance of visual effects – make Ford v Ferrari look like a polished modern commercial blockbuster, but in truth the film is more the kind of classic epic that audiences have always flocked to. With two Hollywood superstars in a David-versus-Goliath story about overcoming impossible odds through sheer ingenuity, this film takes on a touch of the timeless –
THE FILM TAKES ON A TOUCH OF THE TIMELESS – EVEN FOR THOSE LOST IN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT HORSEPOWER OR RPM
even for those who feel lost in conversations about horsepower or RPM.
At first glance, the film is a tribute to an age when American engineering ingenuity ruled the world. But it
isn’t so much about Ford beating Ferrari; it’s more about
how two visionaries excelled in their art, in spite of the forces – and the bosses – that constrained them. That makes for a thought-provoking statement about the filmmaking process. Film, after all, is the costliest art in the world, and it’s often fraught with compromise. But for
any enterprise to truly succeed, the vision of the creator
has to win out over the competition – and Ford v Ferrari
proves that in more ways than one.