Every year there’s 1 or 2 movies that feel like a studio executive going to a filmmaker and saying: “make me an Oscar movie.” Ford v Ferrari is one of those movies this year. That connotation projects well onto James Mangold’s film. It’s traditional. It stars MOVIE stars. It’s a period piece. And it’s at its core well told and fun, which is the bottom line.
James Mangold takes us back to the 1960s, and revolves Ford v Ferrari around Le Mans, the 24 hour car race that carmaker Ferrari dominates. Ford, on the other hand, is your aging mass car producer. In an effort to reach out to the kids, Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) convinces Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and head of marketing Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) to try to beat Ferrari. After getting a blank check, Iacocca enlists former Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to create the car that will beat Ferrari. Shelby agrees, but only if Ken Miles (Christian Bale) is his driver. Shelby knows Miles has the goods to win the race, but the Ford execs see Miles as a potential advertising risk.
Ford v Ferrari takes all its cues from the past, good and bad. The period specific cars look stupendous, and the racing cues feel like the great car racing movies like Rush or Days of Thunder. Your plot here is the standard sports underdog story, overcoming impossible odds, sometimes on multiple storylines, to win the day. You have two great leading men carrying the movie, Christian Bale and Matt Damon, surrounded by other talented male actors, as the super talented Caitriona Balfe does her best to elevate the “supportive wife” role but basically has nothing important to do. More often than not these traditions are good ones, creating a host of likable charismatic people for us to root for. But that also means we’re gonna have to deal with outdated class and gender stereotypes along the way as well as using a family to show how good the “complicated” lead is, which simply take up screen time and leave us waiting to get back behind the wheel.
It’s Matt Damon and Christian Bale that make Ford v Ferrari special, each carrying the dual sports plot of the movie. Bale gets the fun role, playing Ken Miles like race car’s version of a genius who has no time for niceties because all he cares about is the car. Mangold and the writers do a great job showing why Ken was always going to be “the guy” despite what Ford wants: Bale makes him come alive when he’s working, or racing, or pushing the car up to and past its limits. Damon is the movie’s glue as Carroll Shelby. You can see Shelby would want nothing more than be behind that wheel, but he’s lost the juice to do so. So he contributes by trying to pitch his vision of victory and fight Ford and their public relations issues. Damon effortlessly navigates between the car story and the executives story with the ease of a talented actor, so much so that you don’t realize how integral he is to Ford v Ferrari’s success until the very end.
The word that left my mouth after leaving the screening of Ford v Ferrari was “Satisfying.” The story is good. The races are exciting. And the acting is wonderful. Traditional recipes like that stay around because, and get this, they make the audience happy. I like to be happy, don’t you?