Ford vs Ferrari is a three hour movie that feels like six hours about a race that’s 24 hours long. It’s been about three months (Feb 9, 2020) since I’ve seen this movie and I never really felt any urgency to review this movie, because I think we were all either bored enough to go or not interested enough in cars to bother at all. I’ve always been pretty down on car movies, including Cars, which I still maintain is the worst and most problematic of the major Pixar movies (and I saw The Good Dinosaur). I’ve been especially down on this movie ever since the trailer was beat into my brain. I’ve been mostly down on it because I can’t imagine a movie that so obviously ends with a win for America at the end and which has so little drama in it. There should be some kind of running list of all of the boring things that movies make us try to care about but never quite achieve in doing: poker, sports car racing, and I think maybe karaoke could go on that list? Please find me the Google doc, wherever it is on the internet.
That being said, there are some gems in this movie. Carroll’s wife Molly has a fun scene where she steps outside of the fuck-kitten role in order to be a bit of her own person. She nearly kills her husband driving fast in their run down car while talking about what she perceives as a sort of infidelity on his part: visiting the new Ford test model. “Are you angry because I said I’d stop or because I looked at a race car for half an hour?” Carroll asks and she responds with some of the coolest spouse lines of the year, “Don’t lie to me about what you want to make me happy.” I haven’t been able to shake those words and it’s February, so they must be worth something. I think their relationship is partially some of the most genius parts of the movie and what elevates it from a grease monkey popcorn flick into something slightly more interesting.
Tracy Letts’s Ford has some commanding one-liners, but his characterization is uneven and he spends a lot of the movie vacillating between being in charge of the company that brought down the Nazis and being a delinquent delegater with no interest in even the broad outlines of designing cars or racing. Mom turned to me toward the end and said, “Dead meat,” as Christian Bale’s character starts testing a new car in the desert. The specter of death hovers over the racing scenes, the busted doors, the explosions, the glowing wheels, but for the most part none of those moments pays off as all that spooky. Instead, death comes unexpectedly like an afterthought.
The film isn’t very coy about its end: America wins, but there’s enough twists and turns to make that eventual agitprop feel a little less stupid. The ending is confused and features some existentialist contemplation of the pursuit of progress, but does not put a stake into the ground about what human cost is too much. The “Where are they now?” epilogue ends in 1969 without making comment on the current state of the auto industry or chatting about the intervening fifty years leading to the present. In that sense, the film feels a bit aimless and short-sighted.
There probably isn’t a good reason to check this one out unless you are, you yourself, burning time while racing in a day-long competition in a car with no one to talk to.
