"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Ford vs. Ferrari (2019, PG-13)


Another Oscar movie that wasn’t really at the top of my list but one that I grabbed a chance to see when it came back to my local theater (the one I’ve really got my eye on, by the way, is Parasite, which I’m desperately hoping I’ll have an opportunity to see before the ceremony.) Not 100% up my alley, but it’s very well-made and features some great performances.

In the 1960s, Henry Ford II is looking to reinvent Ford’s image, and at the suggestion of one of his marketing guys, undertakes a mission to build a Ford racing car that will be able to go toe-to-toe with Ferrari at the 24-hour race at Le Mans. He enlists the help of Carroll Shelby, a former champion racer who has moved onto selling cars after being forced out of the sport by a heart condition. Shelby in turn recruits Ken Miles, a hotheaded racer who gets along better with cars than people. The two of them work together to make Ford’s dreams come true… if only the Ford suits will get out of their way.

As evidenced by the summary, this movie isn’t really about “Ford vs. Ferrari.” That’s the plot, perhaps, the narrative event that kicks off the action, but the story is instead “Ford vs. The Guys They Hire to Help Them Beat Ferrari.” Anyone at Ferrari has a relatively small role in the film, including Enzo Ferrari himself, leaving space for the Ford folks to be positioned more as the antagonists of the piece. If Shelby and Miles are the mavericks with the blue-sky ideas and the old-fashioned American determination and grit (metaphorically American – Miles is British) to create a revolutionary new car, Ford and co. are the face of corporate America that cares more about profit than innovation, sacrificing ingenuity for committee-approved stuffed shirts.

This is a more interesting premise than I was aware of going into the film, so I appreciate that, and the movie also does a good job at making me temporarily care about the things that racecar fanatics care about. It drops in the car info we need to know that will be narratively important without bogging us down with it, and it dramatizes the events of building/testing the car and, of course, going to the big race in a way that maintains the drama for non-racing fans. I especially like Miles’s devotion to cars – his eagle-eyed focus of the track, the way he talks to and encourages the car while he races, and his eternal pursuit of the “perfect lap.”

Good pedigree in the cast, led by Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as Miles. Damon’s role is a little more thankless, since he’s positioned more as the reasonable everyman caught between the overly-corporate Ford types and the “difficult genius” Miles. As such, he doesn’t get as much flash, but he’s still very good and brings a nice tone to his interactions with the rest of the cast, including Tracy Letts as Ford, Jon Bernthal, and Josh Lucas. But naturally, it’s his interactions with Bale where he really shines. It’s been a few years since I was really all-in on Christian Bale, so I sometimes get a little complacent on how good he is. Miles really sparks in his hands, and he’s at once a brilliant mechanic, an adrenaline-junkie driver, a racecar artiste, a distracted but devoted father, and a terrible self-promoter. Excellent performance there.

I wouldn’t say the film wowed me in any big way, but it’s a solid mid-century period piece that didn’t go in all the directions I thought it would. As far as the Oscars go, it’s up for four awards: Edting, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing… and Best Picture. That’s odd to me, that a film could be one of the best movies of the year without being acknowledged as having any of the besting acting, screenplay, or direction. Maybe it speaks more to the demographics of the average Oscar voter, a nice safe bet that gets the job done with a hat-tip to nostalgia.

Warnings

Violence, intensity/peril (not exactly violence, but definitely men putting their lives in danger by driving cars at 200 miles an hour,) language, and drinking/smoking.

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