Ford v. Ferrari (2019)

I am not a car person, and I am especially not a race fan. I’ve seen both “NASCAR” and “Formula 1” in person, and my entire response to both was a resounding meh.

Similarly, I’ve been to car shows before. I can appreciate the outside beauty of a super car, or the deep rumble of an American muscle car, but the minute someone starts talking about horse power or RPMs or anything more advanced than “push gas, go zoom,” my eyes start to cloud over and I very quickly lose interest.

So with that being said: I was clearly not the target audience for “Ford v. Ferrari” (2019).
Now, this being an American movie, about an American company racing an American-made car in a European race (Le Mans), you can guess with 100% certainty how this ends: the American wins.
Spoilers, I guess, if you somehow didn’t know the basics of Hollywood storytelling.

Most of the movie focused on Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a British auto mechanic living in the US, who was hired by legendary automaker Carrol Shelby (Matt Damon) - namesake of the GT Shelby Mustang, if you didn’t already know - to create a car on behalf of Ford Motor Company to defeat Ferrari at Le Mans.
Yes, this was based on the real life events, spiced up Tinsel-town style for pizzaz.

Apparently Ford’s interest in getting into the races was to develop a new line of cars for a new generation of Americans (Baby Boomers) to drive, ones that didn’t fit the old, stuffy stylings of their parents’ generations. Between Ford losing races and Ferrari losing lots of money, there was an attempt at striking up a deal for Ford to buy Ferrari - one would gain necessary capital, one would gain racing cred. Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) of Ford made a negotiating misstep and Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) decided to be a cranky old man. Enzo insulted the entirety of the Ford company, the staff, and then dropped one of the best insults I’ve heard: “Tell your boss that he’s not Henry Ford. He’s Henry Ford the Second.”
He really needed a mic to drop.

Henry Ford the Second (Tracy Letts) took himself far too seriously, acting as if simply sharing a bloodline with Henry Ford meant he was some kind of legend, sans merit. Upon hearing the insult from Enzo, wrote a blank check to Shelby and his team to do whatever necessary to beat the Ferrari team.

There. That’s the plot. Two and a half hours. 270 minutes of watching cars do car things and make car noises while listening to Miles scream obscenities from the inside of a racing cockpit. Ugh. Too much.

Speaking of Miles: I have to hope that he was closely modeled off real-life Ken Miles, because the Bale-portrayal was of a brilliant mechanic who had no ability to filter his words or manage his anger when even the slightest thing upset him.
I know it’s a trope, both in movies and in real life, to ignore someone who is being particularly petulant because they have some savant-level of skill for something necessary at the time being, but when it’s anger problems that are allowed to carry over to the work place, all it does is normalize shitty, toxic masculinity behavior in real-life work places.
Ergo: as long as Bale-Miles was mirroring real-Miles’ behavior, I can tolerate it. If director James Mangold did it just to have an “interesting” character, then I hate it.

At one point, when Henry Ford the Second was emphasizing the importance of winning the Le Mans to Shelby, he made some comment along the lines of “this isn’t the first time Ford has gone to war in Europe.” Which is true. The War Department (now the Department of Defense) did use Ford factories for rush-production of aircraft and ground vehicles.
But, as the movie conveniently forgot to relay, Henry Ford the First was an avid anti-Semite. Adolf Hitler described him as an inspiration and noted him by name in “Mein Kampf” and Ford motor vehicles were the only non-German-made cars that Hitler authorized for use in the Nazi party. 
Apparently Henry Ford the Second spent much of his career trying to undo the sins of the First and supported many Jewish efforts.
But still: maybe don’t use WWII anecdotes when referencing your Nazi-loved vehicle brand.

As for the racing: There was a lot of it.
A loooooooot of it.
Far, far too much of it.
I remember watching the Harry Potter movies as a kid and thinking the extended scenes of Quidich matches were fascinating, because I was a kid and cool CGI is cool. My parents, on the other hand, were far less enthused and I never understood why.
Now I do.
For a movie that was making come-hither eyes at a three-hour time stamp, there needed to be far more character development or conflict. Or, alternately, much of the car racing should have been cut out and the show time needed to be drastically reduced.

There were also a lot of scenes of Miles’ son, Peter (Noah Jupe) watching his father with awe, or watching the races on TV and asking “why is he doing that?”
I know, Peter was a child, and children ask a lot of questions, but Peter existed here purely as a way of providing explanations and exposition to the audience under the guise of informing an uninformed individual. It was actually kind of a cute way to do it, and it’s fairly uncommon, but there was just too much and it quickly became old and annoying.

I noticed, on multiple occasions, that Henry Ford the Second was a bloviating windbag. He’d surrounded himself with sycophants who, except for Lee Iacocca, agreed aggressively with everything he said, regardless of whether or not his decisions would actually advance his desire to beat Ferrari.

Before writing this review, I looked up one of those “what they got right, what they got wrong” type of articles about the movie v.s the real life events. In the movie, Ford exec Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) was a brown-nosing slime ball the entire time. In a real-life interview about the movie, Beebe claimed he took certain actions for the betterment of the company, to protect assets, ensure race victory, etc. Which, sure, of course he’d say that. There’s no way Beebe would admit to being scuzzy in real life, so it’s hard to know what his actual role was in the lead up to the Le Mans.

The music was generically good.
However, one piece really stood out to me: it sounded almost exactly like the one of the tracks from “Passengers” (2016), so that was weird.

As for special effects: I have to assume that this movie was split about 50/50 - I’m sure many of the cars were just some kind of CGI composite when they needed them, while others were practical creations for the production. Obviously none of them were the real cars from the actual race from 50 years ago. They all looked cool though.

Side note: Miles’ car, #1, for the Le Mans was surprisingly dirty inside. When they showed inside scenes during the race, the speedometer and other dashboard dials looked like they were caked with dirt on the edges. While Le Mans was obviously not the first time that car had ever been driven, it wasn’t a 10-year-old commuter car either, so it certainly seems like everything inside should have been far cleaner.

While this was “about” Ford beating Ferrari at the Le Mans races, it was actually focused on Ken Miles and Carrol Shelby and their friendship.
I wonder how much different this would have been if they’d actually focused on the R&D process instead.

Interesting last note: apparently in other countries, this movie was called some iteration of “Le Mans ’66,” because that’s what it orbited around. I can only imagine that if it had that title in the U.S., audiences would have assumed it was some kind of weird foreign film, despite having Christian Bale and Matt Damon. 
And, of course, unless you’re Italian or American, neither Ferrari nor Ford would hold any cultural significance to you.

In the end, it was an okay movie. 
Honestly, had it been shorter (seriously: 90 minutes would have been perfect), I would have liked it better. 
Mangold, in his attempt at getting too many details into his movie, shot himself in the foot and lost a claw. It wasn’t bad, it really wasn’t, it was just exhaustingly long.
If you’re bored on an airplane, this will take up most of the cruising time, regardless of where you’re flying to.
I can’t recommend it for couch-watching at home.