Ford v. Ferrari is a love letter to testosterone, and to boys playing with cars and getting mad at other boys who don’t want to let them play with their cars the way they want to play with those cars. It gets lazy in key places, with an antagonist who could have been written by a 10-year-old, played in an uncomfortably simpering manner throughout the film. It’s also kind of fun, if you want to dial back your brain for a few hours without turning it off completely, thanks in large part to the outstanding camera work that puts you right on the track in each of the film’s racing scenes. It just became available to rent via amazon and iTunes this morning.
Based on the outline of a true story, Ford v. Ferrari tracks two men, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who find themselves recruited by the Ford Motor Company to build a race car capable of beating Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Ford executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) pitches this idea to Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) as a way to change the company’s image, and sells the scion on the plan to go out and find the best people to build that car and race under the Ford name. They run into opposition from the ambitious sycophant Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), who tries repeatedly to take control of the project or stymie it any way he can, but ultimately the Shelby/Miles duo do make that car and race it at Le Mans in 1966.
There’s so much wrong with this movie on a fundamental level, but that really wasn’t enough to stop me from enjoying just about all of it. Ford v. Ferrari is just fun. We caught it in a theater, so the sound and visuals of the races were very effective at putting us right on the track with Miles, whether it’s on various test tracks as they try to build the car or the actual races at Daytona and Le Mans when they do get out there. The three screenwriters punch up the race scenes with drama on and off the tracks, including decisions on how far to push Ford’s new GT engines (7000 rpm is pitched from the opening scene as a critical threshold) and disagreements between Shelby and Beebe on how to handle each race. There’s a fair amount of time between races in the script, from more internal drama to conversations about how best to build the car or handle the heavy wear on the brakes during a 24-hour race, but the scenes are generally short to keep the nearly 150-minute movie from flagging. For a movie of its length, it hums along without too much interruption … and have I mentioned how thrilling the race scenes are? I don’t even like car racing of any sort, but the sounds during the race sequences are so well done, which I suppose explains why Donald Sylvester won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for this film.
However, there’s a lot wrong under the hood here, starting with the portrayal of Beebe, a real person who did make the controversial decision to have the three Ford cars cross the finish line very close to each other (not simultaneously, as shown in the film) in 1966, a decision he long defended as borne of safety concerns rather than a photo op. (A friend of Beebe’s defended his legacy in this 2016 post, which has some details relevant to this film as well.) Beebe is the most one-dimensional, disposable antagonist you could conceive for the good ol’ boy Shelby and the English rebel Miles, and Lucas plays Beebe with an over-the-top, effeminate manner that contrasts poorly with all of the very masculine men who are just trying to build a better race car, gosh dang it. When Beebe isn’t sucking up to Ford II – and the very talented Letts is rather wasted in that role – he’s scheming to overthrow the project, or trying to pull one over on Shelby, who responds with frat-boy trickery to win the day.
There’s also one named female character in the entire film, Miles’ wife Mollie, whose name I had to look up just now because she’s not that significant in the story itself. Played by Caitriona Balfe, Mollie is there to alternately support and argue with Ken, to worry a lot while he’s racing, to get mad over unpaid bills, and to wear sundresses. I’m not all about the Bechdel test, but whoa boy, does Ford v. Ferrari flunk that.
The film was nominated for Best Picture, which feels like a stretch to me – it’s an extremely enjoyable movie, but I’d have a hard time thinking of it as ‘great’ in the Best Picture sense. Its other nominations were all easier to understand – Sound Editing, for which It won; Sound Mixing, and Film Editing. It didn’t get a screenplay nod, and director James Mangold wasn’t nominated. Neither lead actor was nominated either, although Bale is excellent as Miles and would have been more deserving of a Supporting Actor nod than Anthony Hopkins. If it wasn’t good enough to get screenplay, directing, or acting nominations, what is the probability that it was one of the nine best movies of the year? Give that spot to The Farewell, or Knives Out, or any of several foreign films nominated, and let Ford v. Ferrari be what it is: a much smarter than normal action film/buddy movie with some truly thrilling car-racing scenes.
