Ford v Ferrari: Boys and their toys offer an experiential jolt in this battle of car giants at Le Mans

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

In a not-narratively-important but profound one in Ford v Ferrari, maverick ex-racer turned auto exec Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) takes a middle-aged Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) for his first ride in a Le Mans worthy race car.

Ford, born into privilege and wealth because of cars, surrounded by them all his life, has ironically never known the experience of speed. He emerges ashen, as if he’s had a frightening epiphany.

Matt Damon and Christian Bale play ‘60s racers and auto imagineers Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles.

In fact, he’s simply caught up with the audience. For all the formulas it rides on, director James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari, about the auto-giant’s sudden, pride-driven obsession with winning trophies in the ‘60s, passes and laps the one key test of any car movie. It is experiential. It fairly puts you inside cars making hairpin turns at 200 mph. And it brings that sense of metal-mangled death being a split-second away at any point during a 24-hour endurance race.

This aspect puts Ford v Ferrari in the class of contemporary car films like Ron Howard’s criminally little-seen Rush, or the bar-setting documentary Senna.

And without that experience, the plot of Ford v Ferrari would effectively stall. As it is, it’s a boy’s-own ‘60s tale of two best frenemies (played by Damon and Christian Bale), whose differences ultimately must be settled by a good, old-fashioned fight in the street, with badly thrown punches and a lot of rolling around. On a larger scale, Ford v Ferrari is about corporate will versus defiant, individual creativity – the partners in an uneasy marriage that plays much bigger today.

Ford v Ferrari begins with a quick reminder that all business is personal, at a merger negotiation between Ford’s money-men and Enzo Ferrari himself (Remo Girone). The dealmaking turns out to be an elaborate fraud on Ferrari’s part, a way of sizing up the ugly Americans and sending them home with a wounding message. “Tell him, he is not Henry Ford, he is Henry Ford II,” Ferrari tells them.

This is Ford’s exact weak spot, and his anger creates an obsession, to hit his foreign tormentor where it will hurt him most – on the racetrack. His grandiose determination (many have noticed the Trump notes in his character) is that stodgy old Ford, the automaker for suburban garages and bungalow carports, will create a car that ends Ferrari’s domination of Le Mans.

Enter Carroll and curmudgeonly U.K.-born Ken Miles (Bale), the latter of whom has let go of a formidable racing career to run a (failing) boutique garage for sports car owners. His brutal frankness on the subject of cars makes him his own worst enemy, both as a businessman and as the man sold to Ford by Carroll as their best bet for designing a Ferrari-beater.

He’s buoyed on the home-front by his wife (Caitriona Balfe, who manages to create some flames of determination within the straitjacket of “the wife”) and his worshipful son (Noah Jupe). Meanwhile, at Ford, Miles’ obvious genius is at odds with the fact that he is not corporate material, and he spends as much time overcoming the hurdles placed in his way by the movie’s cardboard villain Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), whose position as the CEO’s lackey is threatened.

In what amounts to a character arc in Ford v Ferrari, Miles’ must learn to tamp his anger, even when omitted, for PR reasons, from the racing team at Ford’s first Le Mans. He simply listens to the race on the radio, continuing to work on engines as he burns inside.

Ford v Ferrari is a ‘60s story told in a traditional way that would be as relatable to a ‘60s audience as a 21st Century one. It has its emotional high-notes (Miles’ relationship with his son is fleshed out with years of backstory). And there is much car talk, techno-babble on an almost Star Trek level, about torque and physics and what can be tossed to lighten the load.

But it’s on the track where it finds traction. The events of the various races, reflected on the faces of characters whose lives revolve around the outcome, tell a story all by themselves.

Ford v Ferrari. Directed by James Mangold. Starring Christian Bale, Matt Damon and Tracy Letts. Opens wide Friday, November 15.