I’m not really one for car racing. Actually, I’m not really one for sports of any kind. But even I would admit that seeing the trailers for the new Ford v Ferrari made the sport look exciting, with a good cast and a lot of energy that would befit a sport about high speed vehicles careering around a track. And I’m not one for cars either.
As it is, Ford v Ferrari does manage to work for a person like me, but that’s probably more due to the presence of reliable stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale.
Damon stars as Carroll Shelby, who in 1959 became the first American driver to win the grueling 24 hour Le Mans race in France. However, he also has a heart ailment keeping him from racing himself. That doesn’t stop him from running a small sports car manufacturing shop and a race team on the side. That race team’s driver is one Ken Miles (Bale), a quick-tempered fellow with an iconoclastic streak. Ken’s temper generally keeps Shelby from getting sponsors until one day, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) from Ford Motor Company comes a’calling. Ford wants to defeat Ferrari at Le Mans after Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) personally insulted and embarrassed company owner Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). Shelby, as a part winner, seems to be the right man for the job. Ken? Not so much.
James Mangold’s direction works to create a sense of excitement around the actual racing, but the best scenes may be Shelby, Ken, and their team putting their heads together to figure out how to make a Ford faster and more reliable for a pure endurance race. Even if I didn’t leave the theater any more interested in racecars than I did when I went in, at least I can appreciate the amount of work and effort it took to make the car and demonstrate why Ken had to be the man driving it.
That said, the movie’s title is a bit of a misnomer. Ferrari isn’t really the enemy here. Sure, Enzo appears from time to time, often speaking untranslated Italian, but he seems to show more contempt for Ford Motor Company than anything else. If he has any negative feelings for Shelby or Ken, he keeps them to himself. And, quite frankly, the real conflict isn’t between Ford and Ferrari. It’s between Shelby, Ken, and their team and Ford, as epitomized by executive Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas).
Beebe here represents the Ford bureaucracy at work. He clashes with Ken almost immediately, and his biggest issue with letting Ken drive seems to be the fact Ken isn’t a clean-cut, All-American type that can be used for advertising purposes. Shelby’s team just wants to build a fast car and win races. Iococca is something of a rather weak ally, and Ford himself can be reasoned with if Shelby can actually get to him, but then there’s Beebe making what seemed even to my generally racecar ignorant self to be some rather baffling decisions.
So, really, it’s freewheeling racers vs. executives who don’t know what they don’t know. And Bale embodies that perfectly. Bale is, as an actor, very good at putting a physical stamp on his characters. Think of the general restlessness and inability to hold still in his Dicky Eklund from The Fighter. Here, his Ken is a thin ball of general cantankerousness. Just the way the man juts his chin out says he’s not someone willing to take anyone’s BS while at the same time, he’s one of the boys ready to enjoy life even when he isn’t throwing wrenches and punches at Damon’s Shelby.
In fact, Bale’s general energy level means that, like he did to Mark Wahlberg in the aforementioned The Fighter, Bale does tend to overshadow the more grounded performance Damon gives. Damon’s Shelby is a guy who seems to bottle up a lot of his feelings when he isn’t playing pranks on competitors, popping pills, or butting heads with Ford executives. If anything, the merits of Damon’s performance come out best at the end of the movie when Shelby starts to let his guard down.
Ford v Ferrari is a solid movie from top to bottom, and if I can appreciate it, I can’t imagine how well it will go over for, say, my one motorhead cousin. The race scenes are exciting, the corporate scenes are well-paced, and the performances, led by Bale, are great. The movie’s only real flaw is, like many based-on-a-true-story sports tales, it does follow a familiar pattern, keeping Ford v Ferrari from being maybe not an all-time classic, but at least a well-crafted familiar story. And there’s something ironic about a movie about a bunch of guys defying corporate America to build a unique car and team appearing in a movie that does seem a little by-the-numbers.
Grade: B+
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