James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari brings to mind Roger Ebert’s classic line about Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor being “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours.” A lethargic epic about the triumph of mass-scale U.S. industry to forge a product that combines European craftsmanship with American power, the film is a standard-issue smorgasbord of period echoes, reflective father-son drama, and ruminations on the good old days of the American dream. At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, Ford v Ferrari’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.
To the film’s credit, its initially po-faced depiction of an American car company’s competition for entrepreneurial supremacy is swiftly revealed to be cynically motivated. When Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) agrees to ready his cars for the racing circuit in order to increase the Ford brand’s prestige, he at first opts to simply attempt to acquire Ferrari rather than compete with the Italian car manufacturer. The pompousness of the man’s corporate position is evident from his first entreaties on the proposition, with Letts luridly oozing the unctuousness of his character’s capitalist nobility. This is a man in his 50s who heads one of the world’s largest companies but asserts his authority by birthright. Amusingly, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) ignites the war between his company and Ford by calling out this trait in the man, noting that he’s only “Henry Ford the second, not Henry Ford,” wounding the CEO’s pride.
To craft a racecar that could win the 24-hour Le Mans competition, the Ford Motor Company turns to Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a Le Mans winner turned car designer. Carroll’s experience behind the wheel gives him an intimate knowledge of how a minor adjustment to a vehicle can dramatically change how it handles, and his on-the-fly mechanical expertise is a freedom that Ford’s bureaucratic method mangles with extra hands. “You can’t win a race by committee,” Carroll argues when the company tries to overcomplicate the project. Carroll also demands to use his personal racer, the temperamental but skillful Ken Miles (Christian Bale), saying that the man behind the wheel is as crucial as anything under the hood.
Mangold bathes these men in golden magic hour light and the cool, reflective blues of twilight. They’re positioned as embodiments of basic goodness, honest work, and personal values: Carroll the business owner who works closely with the men on his shop floor rather than pushing paper in an office all day, and Ken the unpredictable livewire, who keeps his rambunctiousness in check through his love of his wife (Caitriona Balfe) and son (Noah Jupe).
That the film so often concerns the duel between Ford and these two men, rather than the one between Ford and Ferrari, enriches what could otherwise have just been a typical sports drama. Numerous scenes show Carroll and Ken forced to contend with the nattering nabobs who fill Ford’s executive board, who intrude on design conversations with suggestions that prioritize the branding of the racecar over its actual functionality and want to replace Ken with a more camera-ready driver. The pressure of their constant harping is such that Ken’s testing of the racecar on a practice track feels like a reprieve, with the roar of the vehicle as it makes hairpin turns and pushes for new speed records at times proving hypnotic and strangely tranquil. But the moments that depict Carroll and Ken speaking in gearhead jargon as they make infinitesimal adjustments to their prototype car can be tedious, and the test-driving sequences occasionally exude the canned quality of a sports montage.
Mangold manages to perfectly balance the oscillating emphasis on racing and behind-the-scenes drama in the film’s last act, in which the team led by Carroll competes in the 1966 Le Mans race. Scenes of Ken zooming around practice tracks all by his lonesome give way to ones that foreground the life-and-death dangers of competitive racecar driving, with cars spinning out, colliding, and catching fire all around him, and at speeds up to 200mph. All the while, the Ford execs treat Ken as if he were some advertising model, passing down demands that he race more photogenically as the man tries to win the competition in the only way he knows how. Plenty of sports-themed films end in disappointment for its protagonists, but Ford v Ferrari contains an added element of cynicism that stretches far beyond the matter of who wins or loses, a reminder of how badly corporate sponsorship and ownership undermines the individual and team achievements that are foundational to the mythology of sports.
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