by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched quite a good movie: Ford v. Ferrari, a 2019 dramatization of a story I remember
vividly from my childhood in the 1960’s when the Ford Motor Company decided not
only to enter auto racing big-time but take on Ferrari at the 24-Hour Race at
Le Mans, France. The stars of this movie are Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby, the
Texas-born driver turned sports-car builder who made a deal with a tiny British
car company called AC to put Ford engines in their cars, thus creating the
legendary Cobras; and Christian Bale as Ken Miles, British-born racing driver
who helped develop the Ford GT 40 into a Le Mans competitor. The film opens
with Carroll Shelby winning the 1959 Le Mans race in a British Aston-Martin —
the only time between 1958 and 1965
any car that wasn’t a Ferrari
won that race — only his continuing heart problems lead to his retirement from
race driving as his doctor warns him that he can’t stand the strain of it and
it could lead to a heart attack. It then cuts to Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal)
fighting a corporate war at the Ford Motor Company, trying to convince CEO
Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), the grandson rather than the son of the company’s founder, Henry Ford (Ford II’s
father was Edsel Ford, after whom Ford named one of its biggest failures in the
late 1950’s) that the youngsters who were conceived in the post-World War II
“baby boom” are now teenagers, and as they become old enough to drive they’re
going to want sportier cars than their parents’. Iacocca green-lights the project
to create the Ford Mustang, which was sensationally successful commercially
even though (like the previous Ford Thunderbird, which isn’t mentioned in the
story) it wasn’t really the
high-performance sports car it claimed to be (or that Ford’s hated rival,
Chevrolet, was building with the Corvette). Iacocca’s first idea was simply to
buy Ferrari’s company — Iacocca has heard that, despite its long string of
racing wins, Ferrari is in poor financial shape — only the negotiations between
Ford’s executives and the feared Commendatore Enzo Ferrari (Commendatore means “Commander” and was an honorary title
bestowed on Ferrari by the Italian government) end up in a series of mutual
recriminations and insults. (I joked to Charles that the last time we’d heard
Italian spoken in a movie it was in a very different sort of film: the 1950
Alberto Lattuada-Federico Fellini movie Variety Lights.) So Iacocca decides, as one sports-car magazine
put it, “If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em,” and he gets Henry Ford II to
green-light the Ford GT project to develop a car that will win Le Mans, show
Ferrari who’s boss in the auto world, and also give Ford a high-performance
image that will lead young people to buy Fords rather than Chevys or imports.
(After the success of the Mustang both General Motors and Chrysler attempted
imitations — the Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird, Plymouth Barracuda and
Dodge Charger.)
Alas, Henry Ford II puts an executive named Leo Beebe (John
Lucas) in charge of the racing program, and Beebe throws his weight around,
ruling Ken Miles off Ford’s first Le Mans team because he doesn’t think the
maverick Miles presents the right sort of image for Ford. (Before he became
John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara
had been chief operating officer of Ford, and though he was gone from the
company when the events of this film take place his influence on Ford’s
corporate culture was still so strong that virtually all the Ford executives
shown in the film wear McNamara’s trademark black suits and thick-rimmed
black-framed glasses.) Even if you’re not particularly interested in auto
racing (as I was when this film’s events took place, though I’m not now), Ford
v. Ferrari, directed by James Mangold
from a script by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and James Keller, is
an excellent, gripping film. Mangold is a quite underrated director who’s
especially good with stories of men under stress — he did the Johnny Cash
biopic Walk the Line and two
of the best films in the X-Men cycle, Wolverine and Logan — and in this one he’s got quite a few fascinating
conflicts to work with. There’s the weird inversion of the David and Goliath
story — in the consumer-car world Ford was Goliath and Ferrari was David, but
in the racing world it was the other way around — though it’s also an eerie
anticipation of Michael Bloomberg’s Presidential campaign: the conviction among
certain super-rich men that they can buy absolutely anything, whether an auto racing championship or the
presidency of the United States, if they have essentially unlimited money and
the ability to throw it at what they want. Ford v. Ferrari is also a relatively honest depiction of corporate
capitalism and the difficulty of getting any visionary project through a major corporation without
the layers of bureaucracy between the visionaries and the CEO getting in the
way and screwing things up.
Ford v. Ferrari has its weaknesses — virtually the only female
character in the film is Miles’ wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe), depicted as a
perfect little woman who serves her man without question despite her anxieties
about the danger of what he does for a living (she meekly fetches Coca-Colas
for her husband and Shelby after they get into a fight on her lawn), and
there’s only one scene in which the existence of Ford’s workers is acknowledged
(when Henry Ford II orders the assembly line shut down to illustrate the
existential threat GM in general and Chevrolet in particular poses to the
company). But overall it’s a surprisingly powerful movie that ably
demonstrates, as no auto racing movie I can recall has done, just how dangerous
this sport really is. At times the start of the Le Mans race — in which the
drivers are on one side of the road, the cars on the other, and when the green
flag drops they’re required to run to their cars, enter them and start them — looks like a bumper-car
attraction at an amusement park, only the cars are crashing into each other and
bits of body parts are flying through the air. (The 1950’s British driver
Stirling Moss used to practice Le Mans starts; he was ridiculed for this — what
did a fraction of a second matter in a 24-hour race? — but he explained that he
wasn’t concerned about the time advantage; he wanted his car to start first so
he wouldn’t get caught in a traffic jam of other drivers behind him, often
crashing into each other and taking themselves and their cars out of the race
at its start.)
Ford v. Ferrari is an excellent, understated movie with finely honed direction —
Mangold is one of those un-flashy filmmakers who quietly and understatedly gets
the job done — and surprisingly good performances from his leads, particularly
Damon, who in other parts has basically let his good looks do his acting for
him. Not this time — even though I always thought of Carroll Shelby as having a
more noticeable Texas accent than Damon uses here. And the relationship between
Shelby and Miles is drawn as so convincing a “bromance” that we believe its
tragic ending — Miles dies in an accident while testing the latest version of the
GT40 and Shelby is still emotionally devastated six months later — and Ford
v. Ferrari emerges as an understated
but still powerful tribute to masculinity, male vulnerability and male bonding.
