084 REVIEW
Directed by
JAMES MANGOLD
Starring
CHRISTIAN BALE
MATT DAMON
CAITRIONA BALFE
Released
13 NOVEMBER
ANTICIPATION.
Bale and Damon as boy racers.
Could this be a mid-century The
Fast and the Furious?
ENJOYMENT.
Solidly entertaining Friday
night pulp with some strong
performances in the mix.
IN RETROSPECT.
One to watch while clutching
a pie and a pint over a bank
holiday weekend.
n the year of our Lord 1977, the BBC launched
a weekly motoring magazine show called
Top Gear, which was essentally metal fetish
pornography for petrol-heads of all ages. You could
very well imagine the Brummie racing driver and
mechanic Ken Miles being a diehard fan, if he hadn’t
upped sticks and migrated to America in the early
1950s. He is brought to life by Christian Bale in
this roistering, brassy historical drama based on
the fallout of a petty professional rivalry between
Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari.
Where the former had perfected the bland,
practical, affordable family saloon, the latter
sunk every lira he made into producing sleek,
speedy, erotically-desired racing cars. Then the
demographics shifted: teen hotrods suddenly
had money to blow, and wanted fast, sexy, sporty
vehicles, not a trundling box on wheels. And so Ford
II (played with scowling, comic book grandeur by
Tracey Letts) decides to found a racing division,
bringing Miles and ex-driver-turned-entrepreneur
Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) under his considerable
wing to build a dream machine that’ll have Ferrari
weeping into his limoncello.
In the US, the film comes out under the title
Ford vs Ferrari, which misses the fact that the
Italian icon was on the verge of bankruptcy while
Ford had dollar bills up the wazoo. This was never a
fair fight, so Ferrari is only ushered in at the climax
to appear as a kind of tinpot Bond villain at the
La Mans raceway. There is the sense that director
James Mangold saw that egregious economic
triumphalism maybe wasn’t the way to go with thisone, and so focused instead on the natty, chummy
rapport between Shelley and Miles. The fight on
the home front is then mounted between Ford’s
marketing lieutenants (Josh Lucas breaking out a
fairly rote toadying slimeball act) and Miles, who is
rightly considered to be a maverick and an eccentric- not the ideal spokesperson for a company like
Ford. It’s Shelley’s job to convince the boardroom
that those are the qualities required to win a mad
endurance race like Le Mans.
The film is bolted together very robustly and
cruises along at a decent clip, though unlike its
subject matter, refuses to do anything radical and
risky. La Mans ’66 is, to extend this shopworn car
metaphor a little further, like a reliable, oak-panelled
town car that’s been tricked out with a top-spec
engine and slick paint job. Bale’s performance is the
petrol (sorry, sorry!) that keeps this puppy purring,
and of particular note are the scenes he shares with
his wife Mollie (an excellent Caitriona Balfe) who
sternly accepts her speed-freak husband’s desire to
risk life and limb on the track.
Mangold never really pushes the idea that
race driving in the 1960s was very much a death
sport, perhaps too intent on maintaining an
ambient level of carefree, frivolity. These people
know that, if mortality became an issue, then they
would need to down tools and walk away from this
world. It’s a satisfying, occasionally exhilarating
film, but one which is naggingly risk-averse, and
also maybe one which doesn’t bother itself too
much with the interior lives of its characters.
DAVID JENKINS
Le Mans ’66
I