IN THE FAST LANE
Bale’s latest gets pulses racing
The metaphors come fast and furiously in Ford v Ferrari, a biopic about the 1960s racing rivalry between the U.S. and Italian carmakers, and the personalities that drove the conflict. I mean, check out the opening scene of driver-designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) being told after a big race: “The valve is shot.”
Engine part? None: Heart problem. It takes Shelby off the track, but frees him up to help Ford design a car to compete in the gruelling 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. The team to beat was Ferrari, with a string of six wins going into the 1966 race.
Now listen to Shelby’s handpicked driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) when he sees Ford’s new sports car, the ’65 Mustang. He tells them they need to shorten the wheelbase, lose about half a ton of weight and lower the price. Which, by a startling coincidence, is precisely what I would say about this bloated film, adding that it features one Miles and runs more than two and a half hours, which works out to less than 0.4 Miles per hour. Ba-da-vroom.
But James Mangold is a solid director — see Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, etc. — and he makes the most of a meandering screenplay that assumes viewers care a lot more than they likely do about the internecine battles within the Ferrari and Ford corporations. Jon Bernthal pops up as a pre-Chrysler Lee Iacocca and Josh Lucas relishes his “villain” role as Leo Beebe, a Ford VP with a grudge against Miles.
The film comes to engine-revving life in the visceral, expertly shot race sequences, of which there are two. We see Miles competing in the 24 Hours of Daytona race, about four months before Le Mans. This is a critical event since Shelby has bet the farm on the outcome. If Miles wins, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) has agreed that he can drive at Le Mans. If he doesn’t, Ford gets ownership of Shelby Automobiles.
Then there’s Le Mans ’66, which had its share of drama but didn’t exactly come down to a photo finish. In fact, you can feel the story trying to squeeze excitement out of the historical record without mangling it too much.
But the entry of Ford in the race did have the makings of an automotive moon shot, an
effect recognized and heightened by the filmmakers. Take the quotation that bookends the film: “There’s a point at 7,000 r.p.m. where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. It disappears. All that’s left, a body moving through space, and time. At 7,000 r.p.m., that’s where you meet it. That’s where it waits for you.” It could almost be a line from a movie about the Apollo program. And the driving sequences feature a similar kind of Space Age technobabble meets American ingenuity, with talk of aluminum manifest exhaust systems (I made that up but you get the idea) but also the very real detail that on the first lap of Le Mans, the door on Miles’s GT40 Mark II stubbornly refused to stay closed. Pulling into the pits, he waited while a “technician” hammered it shut with a mallet.
And speaking of brute force, Damon and Bale are like perfectly machined moving parts in this tale. Amazing to think they’ve never shared the screen before now. Damon’s Shelby is an engineer and a diplomat, a carmaker and a peacemaker, telling Henry Ford II and Ken Miles separately what each needs to hear, and basically closing both speeches with the words: “Trust me.”
As Miles, Bale gets to speak in something approaching his natural Welsh accent, and also to wink at the rumours of his explosive on-set behaviour in past films.
In one early scene, he throws a wrench at Shelby — who decides to frame it. Caitriona Balfe plays Mollie, Miles’s wife, the only female speaking part of note in the film. Her addition may have been calculated, but the character has enough agency that I’ll hold my cynicism.
And so it goes with Ford v Ferrari. It doesn’t travel nearly fast enough overall, and more than once I was left asking: “Are we there yet?”
But in the narrative straightaways, with the drama and cinematography and actors firing on all cylinders, there’s no stopping it.
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