Ford v Ferrari: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A conventional but very enjoyable and entertaining movie that will rev up your engine and get your heart racing.

Ford v Ferrari, written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and directed by James Mangold, is the story of American car designer Carroll Shelby and British race car driver Ken Miles as, amidst corporate intrigue, they try to build a car to compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans against the juggernaut Ferrari racing team. The film stars Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as Miles, with supporting turns from Jon Bernthal, Tracy Letts, Caitriona Balfe and Josh Lucas.

Ford v Ferrari is an old-fashioned, meat and potatoes movie that twenty years ago would have been a prime prestige picture and sure fire Oscar contender. Nowadays, with our diversity obsessed woke culture, a movie like Ford v Ferrari, which is about white men accomplishing great things, is generally anathema. The film’s conventional narrative foundation and its traditional movie making approach don’t make for a particularly original cinematic experience, but it does make for an exceedingly entertaining one.

Ford v Ferrari is crowd-pleasing, and at times exhilarating, even within the confines of its familiar structure and simple cinematic aesthetic. The driving sequences are not exactly ground-breaking cinematography, as they are little more than a high-end car commercial, but coupled with stellar sound editing and design, film editing and a quality soundtrack, they become highly effective, if not down right heart pounding.

The cast also elevate the material, as both Matt Damon and Christian Bale give quality star performances.

Matt Damon is one of the very best movie star actors working in Hollywood right now. Damon is not Joaquin Phoenix, but he has enough acting chops and artistic integrity that he isn’t Matthew McConaughey or Ben Affleck either. Damon is consistently watchable and is able to carry a film with a subtlety and skill that few movie stars possess, and that skill is front and center in Ford v Ferrari. Carroll Shelby is a Texan, and at first blush that identity sits uncomfortably on Damon, but within moments he envelops the character and, like all good movie stars, turns Shelby into an extension of Matt Damon.

Christian Bale is maybe the least movie star movie star we’ve ever seen, as he seems to vanish into characters without a trace. In Ford v Ferrari, Bale gives a piss and vinegar performance full of humor and humanity that elevate the proceedings considerably.

Tracy Letts, Jon Bernthal, Caitronia Balfe and Josh Lucas all have small supporting roles, and none of them stand out as being note worthy or, to their credit, awful. The supporting roles are not especially full figured and fleshed out, but the cast make the most of what they’re given.

Ford v Ferrari’s director, James Mangold, is a film maker who has had one of the more baffling careers. Mangold started his career with a film I adored, Heavy, and seemed to be poised to be the next big thing in cinema. He followed up Heavy with Copland, which was a Sylvester Stallone reclamation project filled with acting heavy hitters like Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel. Ultimately Copland was an ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless. After Copland, Mangold strung together a collection of unremarkable mainstream movies, such as Girl, Interrupted, Kate and Leopold, Walk the Line, Knight and Day and Wolverine. Mangold’s only noteworthy film of his entire career was his most recent, 2017’s Logan, which was a very dark take on the Wolverine character from X-Men.

Mangold’s biggest problem as a director is that he has no distinct cinematic style in general, and no visual aesthetic in particular. Even Logan, a film I loved, suffered from a rather flat and mundane look, which was a shame. The same middlebrow visual style is on display in Ford v Ferrari. That is not to say that the film looks bad, it doesn’t, as it is professionally and proficiently photographed, it is to say that the film does not look mind blowingly spectacular, which it could have. While the movie and its cinematographer Phedon Papamichael produce some very nice shots, overall it lacks a visual flair that other directors with more pronounced styles would have brought to it. For instance, it would have been interesting to see David Fincher’s or Christopher Nolan’s Ford v Ferrari. That said, Ford v Ferrari is still Mangold’s best film, even visually, and the movie’s outstanding pacing and dramatic momentum are his doing and he deserves all the credit.

The politics of Ford v Ferrari are sort of intriguing, as at one point it seemed to be just a shameless homage to corporate capitalism and the corruption inherent in it. But upon reflection, the film’s subversive spirit is more apparent, as the film actually has a populist, anti-corporate and nationalist heart beating beneath its undeniably mainstream facade.

It is due to the film’s white male centered narrative and its veneer of capitalistic flag waving, that I think the film will be either over-looked or outright snubbed come Oscar season. The film does not wear its populism, nationalism and anti-corporatism on its sleeve, which will no doubt make that message more palatable for those averse to it, but it also leaves it open to misinterpretation, and in our current culture of outrage, I suspect the movie will garner much outrage if it does make an Oscar push. Much like last year’s Neil Armstrong bio-pic First Man by director Damien Chazelle that was overlooked by the Academy Awards, Ford v Ferrari is telling a story of white male achievement that woke Hollywood is not interested in seeing or rewarding right now. The Ford v Ferrari’’s financial success, and it does appear to be on its way to a robust box office haul, is just more evidence of the gigantic split in perception and beliefs between Hollywood/the media and regular people/inhabitants of flyover country.

Ford v Ferrari is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make on a regular basis but rarely does at all anymore. The paucity of these sort of “grown-up” dramas is maybe why Ford v Ferrari is such a delicious cinematic indulgence. I am not much of a “car guy”, but I found Ford v Ferrari to be such an intoxicating movie that I left the theatre desperate to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood of a used muscle car. The film is definitely not perfect, and has some structural and dramatic missteps, but overall I found it to be a very enjoyable cinematic experience well worth your time and effort to see in the theatre, especially for the enhanced sound. This is the type of movie that regular people (non-cinephiles), will absolutely love, and rightfully so. So grab your keys, starts your engines, race through traffic and make a pit stop at your local cineplex to see Ford v Ferrari…it won’t be a life changing experience, but it will a very satisfying one.

©2019

First Man: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An unorthodox take on a “space movie” that I found to be ultimately satisfying and moving…but your mileage may vary.

First Man, written by Josh Singer and directed by Damien Chazelle, is the story of Neil Armstrong and his long march to the moon. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, with supporting turns from Claire Foy, Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler.

First Man is a film that, for good or for ill, defies expectations. One would expect a film about Neil Armstrong and NASA to be a “space” movie in the vein of the expansive The Right Stuff or Apollo 13, but First Man is not a conventional space movie but rather a painstakingly intimate movie that uses space as metaphor.

What makes Neil Armstrong such a compelling character not only in this film but in our culture, is that he was an exceedingly “normal” person. Armstrong was the everyman of the space program which turned him into a sort of empty vessel which the public could project upon whatever traits they wished. Armstrong was portrayed in the media as smart, strong, honorable, noble and patriotic, but what Chazelle does in First Man is make Armstrong less heroic and more human by showing him to be wounded.

Armstrong’s wound is so palpable and catastrophic that he must risk life and limb and travel 238,900 miles in an attempt to soothe it. Ultimately, Armstrong’s journey to the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, isn’t a running away from his wound, but a solemn yet desperate pilgrimage to it.

The moon in First Man is not a destination or ambition but a ghost, haunting Armstrong at every turn as he tries to take one small step for man through the fog of mourning in an attempt to regain his balance and find some semblance of normalcy once again.

By flouting “space movie” expectations, First Man can be a bit frustrating, but once you accept the premise and go along the dramatic journey, it becomes a remarkably satisfying and deeply moving experience. I readily admit that my own personal life experience made the film resonate with me and that others with a different life experience may not find it so worthwhile.

Emotional pull aside, director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) shows a deft and skilled hand at the helm of First Man. Chazelle’s film wonderfully mirrors Armstrong the man and the character in that it is strictly compartmentalized. Armstrong walls off his emotions and contains his pain and Chazelle uses magnificent framing to express this dramatic reality.

Chazelle also pulls off shooting in very tight spaces, like in the cockpit of a space capsule, by embracing rather than shunning the claustrophobia of those places. Chazelle recreates the physically and emotionally suffocating experience of being compartmentalized to such a degree that you can’t even turn your head to look at the exit, never mind walk through it. Chazelle’s embrace of dramatic claustrophobia also pays off when the cinematic expanse of the moon is finally reached.

Ryan Gosling’s work as Neil Armstrong is spot on, as he keeps with the theme of the film by keeping Armstrong entirely contained. The pain pulsating through Gosling’s Armstrong is tangible, but he keeps it tightly controlled, never letting the wound gush, only fester. The final scene of the film beautifully illustrates Armstrong’s dilemma, he is walled off and isolated, if not quarantined, from the world, and even from his wife, and he is at a loss for words, but still has the desperate human need to connect, even if he is unable to.

The long journey of Armstrong to Lunar catharsis is so potent because it is so deftly and subtly portrayed by Gosling, who with First Man proves once again that he is more an actor than a movie star.

Claire Foy’s work as Janet, Armstrong’s wife, is equally compelling. Foy’s Janet is much more combustible than Neil, but that just means it takes more effort for her to keep herself together. Foy and Chazelle imbue Janet with a percolating dynamism through a focused intensity and a mildly floating hand-held camera that gives Janet the feel of being ever so slightly unbalanced and teetering out of control, like a satellite knocked off its orbit. Janet has a volcanic magnetism that is a testament to Foy’s making the most out of what, in lesser hands, would have been just another astronaut wife character, at best an adoring moon, but Foy’s Janet is a planet unto herself, spinning in a wilder orbit around a dying Sun.

The rest of the supporting cast, which includes Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll and Ciaran Hinds among many others, all do solid work in mostly underwritten roles. The supporting cast are most definitely very small pieces around the sun that is Ryan Gosling, who, along with Claire Foy, carry the emotional and dramatic weight of the picture.

First Man is really a story about alchemy through fire and ice (recurring themes throughout the film) and the psychological transformation and evolution that comes about through the alchemical Grail quest. Neil Armstrong’s connection to the cause of his existential anguish gets further and further away with every passing second, and he single-mindedly chases it through the fire of earth and its atmosphere all the way to the cold silence of the moon to catch up to it one last time.

In conclusion, First Man is not what you’d expect it to be, but it is all the better for it. I definitely recommend you spend your hard earned dollars to see it in the theatre (IMAX if possible). Director Damien Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling create a worthwhile and serious film of dramatic heft that turns the gigantic evolutionary moment of a human expedition to the moon into an intense and intimate evolutionary moment for a single man. When Neil Armstrong said it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, he would’ve been more accurate to say that it was “one small step for mankind, and one giant leap for his humanity”.

©2018