The best movie I’ve seen since The Martian (2015) and one you absolutely should not miss on the big screen.
I’m no petrol head, so have never been much into the mechanics of cars or motor racing. I’ve watched parts of Bathurst races and appreciated rally car events because they at least drove on the sort of roads I used. But the idea of going to a Formula 1 track to stand in one place watching large slot cars whip around a corner seems fantastically boring. Let alone something like NASCAR where they fly around a rectangular track with exactly two corners.
Added to all this has been Hollywood’s increasingly rapid descent into Woke World, where seemingly every movie, even “historical” ones have to deliver at least one, and probably several “Messages” that are approved of by the Modern Left, whether it’s LGBTQ, Global Warming, or the evils of the USA and free enterprise (“Big Business”). The two movie stars in this effort – Matt Damon and Christian Bale – are very much plugged into all that.
As a result I had very low expectations going into the movie and only went because of two reviews. I even persuaded my oldest son to go with me and he’s even more reluctant than I am to spend money at movie theatres, so…
But the movie is magnificent and it’s lot more than a car racing movie.
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| Carrol Shelby |
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| Ken Miles |
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| The Shelby Cobra |
Shelby – played by Matt Damon – had actually won Le Mans as a driver several years earlier but been forced out of racing by a heart condition, which is where the movie starts.
He turns his considerable engineering and sales skills to making his own sports cars, including the legendary Shelby Cobra pictured here.
Meantime in the world of corporate cars another legend, Lee Iacocca, then a young executive tyro with Ford Motor Company, is trying to persuade senior management, including CEO Henry Ford II, to “jazz up” their vehicles and appeal to the upcoming Baby Boomers who have jobs and money and want sexy European cars rather than the staid clunkers that Ford is turning out. The attitude is captured perfectly when Iacocca shows a picture of James Bond standing beside his Aston Martin, only to be told that “Bond’s a degenerate” (modern feminists would likely agree). Nevertheless Iacocca wins his sales pitch and support for his plan to buy Ferrari, which is almost bankrupt.
But it all goes wrong. Enzo listens to Iacocca’s offer but goes with Fiat instead, delivering some choice insults along the way about how the Americans should just go back to “their big, ugly factories” to produce “their ugly little cars” – and that Henry Ford II is not the man his father was.
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| Bale listens to Damon’s Le Mans proposal |
Spurred by these insults Ford decides to write a blank cheque to beat Ferrari at the Le Mans race they have dominated for some time.
Through Iacocca they pick Shelby to get it done, and he in turn picks Ken Miles – played by Christian Bale – as his primary driver-engineer.
Miles is an Englishman and a WWII veteran who drove tanks from D-Day to the end of the war and now lives with his wife and son in California.
He loves his family very much and shows it – but he’s also loves cars and racing them. More than just a driver he runs a small car repair shop (which has tax problems), understands every aspect of car engineering, and berates the occasional customer for not driving a sports car as it needs to be driven. He’s also a very combustible chap.
The two men get to work to build what eventually becomes the Ford GT40. They test the hell out of it at Los Angeles International Airport and after initial doubts, Miles comes to love every minute, even the problems, one of which involves the brakes failing at high speed.
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| Ford GT 40 Mark II – 1966 Le Mans |
But Miles is not liked by some of Ford’s management, especially Senior VP Leo Beebe, who does not consider such a volatile man, and a Brit, to be “the Face of Ford”.
It doesn’t help when Miles, on first meeting Beebe and not knowing who he is, tells him that the newly unveiled Mustang is “a lump of lard“.
Rejected from joining their first Le Mans attempt, Miles listens to the race as all the GT40’s steadily drop out with various mechanical failures, as he had warned would happen if they did not drive them carefully.
Shelby has to answer to an angry Henry Ford who wants him to give one good reason why the whole show should not be canned after such a humiliation. Shelby’s answer is that even with all the failures, one GT40 went down the Mulsanne Straight faster than anything Ferrari has ever produced and that “Old Man Enzo” must know that and be fearful of it.
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| Ferrari 330 P3 – 1966 Le Mans |
The next year Miles gets his shot and the last hour of the movie centres on the race itself and his role in it as one of the co-drivers of the three GT40’s Shelby put into the race.
One of the keys to winning is their idea of swapping out the entire brake system, which is within the letter of the law. It’s not a spoiler to say that they win: you can look it up on the Internet.
But there is an unexpected, bitter-sweet moment when Beebe demands that all three GT40’s cross the finish line together to provide “a great photo“, despite Miles’s car having to slow down and wait for them since he’s leading by almost two laps. And this is added to by the pathos of how the movie ends a little later.
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| Christian Bale as Ken Miles |
Christian Bale is just fantastic as Ken Miles, even if he is aided by getting all the meaty scenes. Although the Oscars have fallen from most people’s view, this role should surely net him another win, this time finally for Best Actor: he’s been nominated twice for it as well as twice for Best Supporting Actor, with one win for the latter.
Watching the movie I’d wondered what criticisms I’d find later about his wonderful “Brummie” accent – only to find out that his actual British accent is not too different. Perhaps his native heritage is a cheat here but even holding one of his endless “moogs” of tea he looks the part.
But Bale’s performance clearly conveys that underneath the language, oil, grease and mechanical knowledge Miles is also an artist, with an artist’s temperament; he absolutely cannot stand authority, at one point telling Shelby that the Ford “suits” will destroy them simply because they hate men who refuse to follow the slots and grooves of everyday life.
We can see that he is desperate to do what he was born for, but only on his terms, meaning that he seeks perfection, as he explains to his son in this quiet and beautiful scene:
Matt Damon is ok as Shelby, although an actor like Matthew McConaughey probably would have been a better pick. Damon just doesn’t look right in a cowboy hat and boots with a Texas twang – which he completely gives up on by the end of the movie! But if Bales shows us the artist’s temper, then Damon certainly portrays with compassion the pride and ambition of a man as he swallows corporate bullshit and deals with his disappointments – and navigates between the suits and Miles.
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| “Got a face like a smacked arse now, haven’t ya?” |
And the two actors do have great chemistry on the screen, in dramatic and comedic moments. They’re helped greatly by sparkling dialog:
“They said I’d have carte blanche this time. I looked it up, it’s French for ‘horseshit.’“.
And it does not always require dialog. In one dramatic scene Shelby has literally bet the sale of his little company to Ford plus Miles driving at Le Mans, on winning the Daytona 24 hour race and finds Beebe scheming to get the other Ford GT40 team to win by using a NASCAR pit team rather than the build crew Shelby has. Under instructions to keep the engine below 6000rpm, Shelby, near the end of the race and with everything to lose, writes on an instruction blackboard and carries it across to the side of the track where Miles can see it:
7000rpm+. Go like Hell.
In keeping with the joyousness of the whole movie, Miles whoops with delight at being able to unleash both himself and the machine he rides.
The movie’s story may be simple but it is beautifully structured and flows effortlessly, with scene after scene that amount to brilliant little movies in themselves. None more so than the last part about the 1966 Le Mans race. There are breaks in the action as drivers swap out and rest, pit stops made and problems – both human and mechanical – are dealt with. It’s not forty continuous minutes of racing, which would be boring.
There is some CGI in the film, mainly around the crowd scenes and the accidents, which are fast and brutal but, as from the drivers perspective, not lingered upon. The racing sequences were mostly filmed on tracks with replica cars, and they are some of the most intense and real that I’ve ever seen, whether externally or as the drivers must have seen it from inside the cars. Whether it’s evading the accidents, cornering, passing, watching the brakes become glowing red discs, or ploughing into rain and darkness at 200mph you truly get to feel how dangerous this is. I saw audience members flinch during one accident scene as a car literally comes apart in front of Miles.
But it also captures those quiet moments that Miles reaches for, where he is simply, “a body moving through time and space“. And yet even in that there is nothing pretentious about this movie: no reference to Zen.
Also no lecturing buzzkills, no puffed up self-importance, none of the usual “messages”. No woke. There certainly is a message told through character and story though and it’s a vital one in these days of whining Western self-criticism and self-pity, and that’s a message about being your own man, about not getting chewed up and spat out in some corporate or government collective, about sons and fathers and husbands and wives and friends and chasing impossible dreams.
By contrast there were those two reviews I mentioned at the start, from which I’ll provide some excerpts. First up is one Hannah Elliott in Canada’s National Post:
Ford v Ferrari shows a generation best left dead and gone….men dominate the screen for 98% of the time, by my unofficial count….. And when I say men, I mean white, straight men…It’s no surprise to survey this patriarchal wasteland — but it’s no less depressing to see it, nonetheless.
Second is something called L.V. Anderson, in The Daily Grist:
‘Ford v Ferrari’ is the climate change horror film nobody needed… As wildfires rage in Australia, a record-breaking hurricane season draws to a close, and meteorologists predict that this year will go down as the second-hottest in recorded history, it’s clear that Ford v Ferrari is the wrong movie for 2019…
Thanks idiots, it’s called The Streisand Effect. As soon as I read all that I knew that this was a movie I had to see.
You should see it too – and take your sons and daughters and grandsons and grandaughters as well. They’ll probably be able to see past the 98% aspect and know that it’s 100% about human beings with a human story that they might be inspired by.
No Minister 