Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Ford v Ferrari
The trick of making a film about a specific, complex discipline, such as astrophysics, fashion, or, in this case, Grand Prix racing, is giving the audience enough information to properly follow the emotional beats without weighing them down unnecessarily, zooming over their heads and delving into detail they aren’t likely to follow. In a sense, it’s sort of like a race car itself: Light enough for the engine to send it hurtling like a rocket, but heavy enough to dig into the corners so it doesn’t fly off into space.
James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari, about the rivalry between Ford Motors, the epitome of soulless car manufacturing, and Ferrari, Italy’s crown automotive jewel, and a testament to the superiority of hand-crafted, lovingly built cars over Ford’s infamous assembly-line methodology, tries to thread this particular needle, and through meticulous storytelling, and the strong work from its two leading men, succeeds admirably.
We start in 1959, as Ford,
attempting to bolster its image from the dowdy cars of the ’40s, makes a bid to buy Ferrari outright, an offer Enzo Ferrari (here played by Remo Girone) takes great offense to, en route to jacking up the price for a better sell-off to Fiat, and tweaking the infamously pompous Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) on his way out the door. Enraged, Ford assembles an executive cabal, lead by Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal), and starts to pour money into a racing team that could credibly compete with the Italian maestro, setting its sights on the grueling 24 hours of Le Mans.
To lead the team, Iaccoca hires Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a former Le Mans winner himself, forced to quit racing on account of a weak heart valve. Ever a capitalist — after quitting the circuit, he opens a high-end customization dealership — Shelby is able to put together a crew attempting to do the near-impossible, which includes the irascible Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a Brit with a bad temper and an understanding of car mechanics and driving that seems to transcend space and time.
At first, of course, there are problems at every level: Mechanical, as the team
working frantically with the Ford engineers attempts to fuse a much larger engine into a smaller car, and interpersonal, as Shelby continually has run-ins with Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), a high-ranking executive with a voluminous ego and Ford’s ear, as Miles pushes everyone to their limit.
Working from a script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller, Mangold’s film has to navigate particularly difficult waters. Not only is there the fabulously complicated engine mechanics from which the film largely subsists, there’s also the small matter of just where our sympathies should be attached.
Unless your jingo is set to maximum, the idea of Ford — a bully of a company, founded by a flamingly anti-Semitic troglodyte whose primary idea was to remove human contact with his machines except as small pins in a much larger mechanism — being taken as a sympathetic underdog to Ferrari, a company that valued not mass production of a worthless “ball of lard,” as Miles puts it, but carefully designed, handcrafted works of art, is difficult to swallow. To Mangold’s credit, he doesn’t shy away from some of this unflattering comparison. Ford (Tracy Letts) is shown to be a coldly commanding ego-centrist (except in one notable scene where Shelby takes
the CEO out for a spin in the car they’ve built, reducing the man to a terrified, weeping husk), and the company, with its endless committees and conniving executives vying for power, little but an irritant to Shelby and the process of winning.
In fact, the film also doesn’t spare Shelby, the legendary designer, whose engines are still considered some of the finest ever built. We see his passion but also his ability to play ball with the corporate suits, pulling the company-man card time and again over his much less refined friend Miles, an unfortunate aspect of his personality that ends up costing Miles a great deal in their time together.
Instead of these louts, Mangold sagely focuses the audiences’ emotional attention on Miles, a man so subsumed by his passion for cars and racing, it comes leaking out of his pores. It is his journey, from hotheaded local driver, unable to make ends meet for his wife, Mollie (Caitriona Balfe), and teenage son, Peter (Noah Jupe); to eventual champion, that becomes the emotional throughline for the film.
As always, Bale, here sporting a winnowed body, John Lydon’s accent and a fierce farmer’s tan, is up for the challenge. He endows Miles with self-belief that never edges into hubris and a sense of purpose that makes him
something of a gritty, greases-meared artiste. In one of the film’s more affecting scenes, he speaks with his son on the idea of a “perfect lap,” one in which no mistakes are made and the driver flows through the vehicle as if weightless.
Mangold spends time on Miles outside of the garage with his beloved family to good effect — those scenes with Miles and Peter engaging with each other, as their bond is revealed in admirably subtle swatches, are some of the best the film has to offer.
Other scenes are not nearly as well put together. One, in particular, in which Mollie takes her husband to task for holding out information from her by driving the family station wagon recklessly fast down a winding country road is a cheap emotional stunt, unbecoming of the character and clumsily assembled (speaking of production by committee, that scene feels as if they wanted to include something that showed Mollie’s grit and churned out that clunker to appease someone’s production note).
Still, on the whole, it’s surprisingly effective, the kind of film people who have no idea about cars, racing or the delicate mechanics of a small block V8 can still come away from having been thoroughly entertained. It might not shatter any land-speed records, but it cruises through its laps in pretty impressive fashion.