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FORD V FERRARI: ED’s Very Important Thoughts on James Mangold’s Racing Movie

It’s taken me a little longer than usual to write about this movie, maybe because I was so blown away when I first watched it that I really wanted it to sink in before I took the time to do any sort of writing. That doesn’t mean this will be a particularly insightful or intelligent review that might say something new about the movie that hasn’t been said in plenty of other reviews, but if you’re reading this far, you might as well continue, right?

I thought I knew what Ford V Ferrari was going to be from the first time I saw footage at CinemaCon back in April. In fact, the movie works on so many other levels besides the racing scenes, one of the reasons why I wanted to spend a bit more time thinking about it before writing about it.  I never got around to seeing the doc The 24 Hour War, co-directed by Adam Carolla, but it’s a doc that tells the same story using archival footage, something I only realized existed after seeing James Mangold’s film. Fortunately, Mangold has given me enough faith and confidence in his work as a filmmaker that I knew his dramatization would find a way to tell the same story in an equally exciting way, and I was correct.

We meet Christian Bale’s Ken Miles, a cranky British race car driver who doesn’t play by the rules, at an important qualifying race where his car has just been eliminated from racing by officials. Matt Damon’s fellow racer Carroll Shelby offers to placate the angry Miles and gets a wrench thrown at him for his efforts. A year or so later, Miles is running his own car repair shop but having serious money issues. The next time Shelby approaches him, it’s to offer him money to help him design a sportscar for the Ford company to race at Le Mans in 1963, a grueling 24-hour race. Unbeknownst to either of them, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) had sent his best man Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to Italy to negotiate a deal with Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) to buy his company so that Ford could get into the sportscar business. That meeting doesn’t end well, and Ferrari’s insults as he sells to another company gets Ford in the type of vengeful mood that could only lead to great innovation. It’s up to Shelby and Miles to work together to design a car that can beat the Ferrari company’s Le Mans winning streak. Although the reason for Miles and Shelby designing this super-car for Ford is primarily for money reasons, it’s just as much about pride and patriotism.  Miles clearly has more to prove as a race car driver who has fallen on hard times.

That’s the set-up, which leads to an exhilarating 2 and a half hours that flies by faster than you might ever expect, and it’s not all racing either. Unlike other movies of this length, the set-up is just as compelling as the actual Le Mans race, and that’s mainly due to the great cast assembled around Bale and Damon.  Very early on in the film, the screenplay – written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller – sets up the relationships with Miles’ relationship with his wife (Caitrione Balfe) and son Peter (Noah Jupe), being just as important in telling what is essentially Miles’ story.  As good as Damon is, as always, Bale’s performance as Miles, complete with a constant scowl on his face, is very much what keeps the movie interesting, because there are far more stakes in him winning Le Mans than for Shelby or even Ford. It’s to Bale’s great credit that he is able to make such a cantankerous and frequently unpleasant character as likable as the characteristic charm Damon brings to Shelby.

The movie is based on a true story, so you may already guess how it turns out, but the last hour when it becomes about Miles and Shelby having to fight back against edicts from the Ford Company, in the form of Josh Lucas’ Leo Beebe, Ford’s right hand man.  It’s another interesting level to the film that’s very relevant in terms of people having to fight against the dominance of the corporations. That might be especially ironic when you realize that the corporation releasing this (Fox) was recently bought by an even bigger corporation (Disney), something that’s hard to ignore.

Sure, there’s a ton of machismo in this movie, and it’s a little disturbing that Ford vs. Ferrarijoins the long list of films this year that has failed to “read the room” and all the calls for diversity, since it’s about as much a white man’s story as you can possibly get. That said, it’s not often when I watch a movie where there’s only one prominent female role with an actor I don’t know or have never heard of her. That’s the case with Balfe, and she completely blew me away, playing so well off of Bale with most of her scenes being on the domestic side of things. Noah Jupe is also really great in Shia Labeouf’s Honey Boy(currently in select cities), and he also is given such a wonderful story arc in his relationship with his father.

It might be somewhat obvious by now, but James Mangold is one of the most underrated and underappreciated directors working today, mainly since he rarely remains in the same genre for more than one movie. Even when he did The Wolverine and Logan back-to-back with Hugh Jackman as the title character (of both movies, oddly), they were very different films. As much as Ford vs. Ferrari blew me away in terms of the filming, editing and sound design used to create the Le Mans racing scenes, the domestic side of Miles’ life keeps you just as riveted to the screen.

Ford V Ferrari is not only one of the best movies of the year, but possibly the best movie of Mangold’s brilliant career. It’s a movie I know I’ll be able to watch over and over, if only to marvel at the sheer quality of all aspects of its filmmaking. I already have tickets to rewatch it in IMAX this Friday.

Rating: 9.5/10

Rewatching The Races

Sporza showed the 2015 Gent-Wevelgem last Sunday and it felt like a hard watch, why sit down for a couple of hours to see something old you know the result of? Well because there wasn’t much else to do and it was a lively edition…but it turned out to be a much better experience that expected. Once you know who wins you can watch and see how they win but there’s more.

Many of the sports channels you’re used to watching racing on are going to be replaying vintage editions instead of the planned live coverage. It’s not the same but here are a few suggestions to make watching repeats more interesting.

One of the reasons we’ve got live coverage from start to finish of more and more races these days is precisely because live TV is a draw for TV channels, whether sport or rolling news. With repeats and replays people skip the ad breaks or tune in for the finale, while live coverage keeps people on edge, even on the flattest of flat stages in the Tour people watch because something could happen. It’s a subject explained further in Why Show The Whole Race? from April 2016.

Source material Things are coming on TV and they’re likely to be recent editions of big races. Chances are you’ve seen them before. But the likes of Youtube and to a lesser extent Vimeo and Daily Motion have more obscure races. This doesn’t mean an early 1990s village kermesse recorded on a Sony Camcorder, more like a mid-week semi-classic or a stage of the Tour of the Alps that you missed. Chances are you don’t remember the winner so if it doesn’t have the live feeling it can still surprise.

Context If you do want to sit down and watch a race, give it proper treatment. Look up the startlist on procyclingstats.com as this is more than a list of names. You’ll see the old teams you might already have forgotten about plus thumbnail images of the team jerseys. You can take this further, for example look up the bikes they were riding or the wider context such as the news or music at the time, perhaps to jog the memory or to help situate the race in time.

  2020 Hindsight If you do know the winner of a race then you can still enjoy watching how they won it. Spoiler alert: Luca Paolini won the 2015 Gent-Wevelgem. But how did he do it? Today to mention Paolini’s name is to think of this race but also his subsequent ejection from the Tour de France months later after a positive test for cocaine and his personal problems with addiction and more. But cast back to that morning in March 2015 and Paolini doesn’t have the same clouds over him or your worries about him getting things back together. He’s just an outsider, a longshot bordering on moonshot.

The early scenes of the race are dramatic as a storm shreds the peloton. Some riders go in the ditch, one gets a musette stuck in his wheel and hurls his bike into the ditch. Even the motos on the race look unstable with their riders dangling their feet close to the ground to help with balance in case of another gust.

Paolini misses the winning move but bridges across and much of his move was solo. Then you can watch him in the breakaway. Chances are when you saw Niki Terpstra, Belgian champion Jens Debusschere, Greg Van Avermaet, Sep Vanmarcke and Geraint Thomas you thought one of them would win, not Paolini. Indeed Thomas was the form rider having just won the GP E3 Harelbeke when he’s associated with the Tour de France now. Paolini even gives you reasons not to back him in the finish, he’s dropped on a climb and has to claw his way back. He made a dummy move in the finale, Thomas is quick to close him down and perhaps it was a test, to see who was fresh and alert? Now you can see Quickstep falling victim to their own tactics, they have numerical superiority but can’t exploit it, they’re expected to chase when someone else goes. All told Paolini’s win looks glorious, he was strong, made the right moves and played the right cards.

All this can be applied to other races, could Tom Boonen have done anything different in the 2016 Paris-Roubaix and where exactly was Mat Hayman all day? Watch another recent cobbled classic and see how Peter Sagan fares, is he marked out of contention, is he lacking team support? Watch for Mark Cavendish and Heinrich Haussler at different points in the 2009 Milan-Sanremo and so on.

The Tell If you’re not watching live you can start to look for new things and small details. One is “the tell” of each rider. Just as poker players look for a nervous tick or other body language cues to suggest their opponent is stressed or confident, cyclists can look for signs their rivals are flagging. Some are obvious like a slowing cadence, rocking shoulders or tilting the head sideways but others are more discreet. In 1989 when Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon were duelling on Alpe d’Huez. Fignon’s directeur sportif Cyrille Guimard knew LeMond well having managed him before and spotted the American’s pedalling technique had changed, his ankle movement was slightly different. Guimard told Fignon to attack and the Frenchman did and took precious time. Chris Froome rarely looked comfortable on the bike in the frenzy of a summit finish on the rare times he was dropped his tongue dropped out. If you know someone is about to crack then try to look for their giveaway.

  When They Were Young The likes of Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel have made an impact on pro racing right from their first year in the pro peloton but it’s more normal for the champions to take their time. So if you’re watching a retro race look out for the surprise young names who might not win but are up there and learning. For example there’s a Netflix documentary about Movistar and you can Richard Carapaz in a new light, he’s no longer just a punchy stage winner and white jersey wearer when he rides the 2019 Giro and when he attacks on the Colle San Carlo and is alone on the descent soon after even his team managers are working the radio trying to dissuade him from pressing on alone to Courmayeur. They see it as a futile waste of energy… it turns out to be the race winning move that saw him take the stage, the maglia rosa and keep it to the end.

Social media If you’re on social media you should find others watching too and can share the moment. If anything the problem at the moment is rather than the sporting calendar dictacting one or two clashing races at most, these days Eurosport UK is showing one race, Eurosport Italia another, Eurosport France a different one while people are watching different races on Sporza, L’Equipe TV and so on.

Summary Apologies if this all reads like obvious tips to watch a race again, like a culinary blog switching to advice on how to sip lukewarm gruel… but it’s all we’ve got in the absence of live sport and perhaps it helps pass the time for some? Rewatching a race despite knowing the result proved more enjoyable than expected and it wasn’t an exercise in nostalgia either, there can be new things to look for. This week L’Equipe TV is showing parts of the 1989 Tour de France (it’s geo-restricted but many people use VPNs these days) and it’s footage that doesn’t exist on youtube, there are new details to look for. Some of it’s haunting though, watching a world in better times with the packed crowds and L’Equipe showed the 2018 Tour of Lombardy, the race touring a region now suffering so much and it’s hard to watch the race without seeing the fans beside the road and wondering how they are today.

Rewatching The Races published first on https://motocrossnationweb.weebly.com/

Going to ramble a bit about something I noticed.

So, I was rewatching the Daughters DLC today (because I'm broke and buying the main game by itself nearly killed me), and at first I didn't think to much about it with the locked drawer with the broken bottle in it. It seems to be obvious that it was a decoy for you to use the lock pick (which was found really close by) on that drawer instead of the one in the bathroom with Lucas' button to his ladder-lamp contraption. Yet, I actually got thinking back to the note in the main game about Zoe and the knives, something that was hinted to have happened pre-Eveline. 

It struck me as odd as to why someone would lock up a broken wine (?) bottle instead of wrapping it up and throwing it out, but I came back to Zoe and the knives and, despite having a headcanon that she was an angry teen (something that wasn't carried over into adulthood all that much), that's a completely different vein to this and it's actually making me believe more about Zoe's knives being a self-defense thing rather than her having anger issues. It's implied in the note that Jack most likely went searching and took the knives Zoe had hidden, but with how frequently Zoe uses the hatch (or from what I take from her using it as a hiding spot, as a kid or not) and her finding that lock pick so close by put the idea in my head that Zoe locked that bottle away, too, as a means to defend herself. She either did that after the knife incident or it was something Jack didn't notice as it was in a pretty broken cabinet in the pantry area with other broken appliances and junk. 

 I don't know, am I making a reach over a broken bottle? Maybe. 

Still, it made me think more about Zoe being scared of her family (which is understandable after Eveline, but there's obvious reason for her to be scared of them pre-Eveline, too, given the notes found) and has put a lot more doubt in me about the whole anger issues thing and her wanting to have weapons at hand simply because of that. Honestly, I'm surprised this isn’t pointed out more. 

Anyway, it's just something that got me thinking.