James Mangold (2019)
My decision to buy a ticket for Le Mans ’66 wasn’t thoughtless but it was, in the event, very foolish. I’ve not been to anything in the Richmond Odeon’s biggest theatre for ages. A two-and-a-half-hour motor racing movie was an inadvisable way of renewing acquaintance with Screen 1’s powerful sound system. I felt pretty battered even before the trailers were over – the high-decibel mosquito buzz and whine in James Mangold’s film then started up immediately. In their first scene together, Mollie (Caitriona Balfe), the wife of engineer and racing driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), tells him how she loves the sound of racing cars: it ‘goes right through you’. That’s just what I hate and a main reason why I’ve never followed motor sport (other reasons include a complete lack of interest in things automotive and the fact that you can’t actually see the drivers). To make matters worse, and although I found Le Mans ’66’s soundtrack deafening, I couldn’t make out much of the dialogue.
The film, with a screenplay by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller, tells the based-on-a-true story of how the Texan Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Brummie Ken Miles built – on behalf of Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and Ford vice-president Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) – a new racing car to take on the perennially dominant Ferrari team at Le Mans, in the 1966 renewal of the 24-hour race there. The movie has been released in the US with the sensible title of Ford v Ferrari and I don’t know why its UK release title is different (especially since it isn’t a remake of the 1971 Steve McQueen picture Le Mans). In the course of the first hour, you see little of Matt Damon’s eyes because he rarely removes his shades. The rest of his face and body don’t tell us much more than his voice does. Christian Bale is more engaging but his playing, compared with those around him, comes across as overplaying. (It may be something genetic: Noah Jupe, as Ken Miles’s son Peter, gives the same impression.) There’s a minor amusement in seeing Bale and Tracy Letts together on screen. As Ford, Letts is so imposingly dull he makes you think that he too would have made a good Dick Cheney in Vice last year, and with much less prosthetic than Bale required.
Why did I bother to give it a go? Because, as Peter DeBruge of Variety rightly says on the Wikipedia page for the film, ‘The best sports movies aren’t so much about the sport as they are the personalities’. For me, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is the classic example of a thoroughly involving film about a sport in which I’ve no interest. I also reminded myself beforehand that Asif Kapadia’s Senna is a first-rate documentary and that Ron Howard’s Rush, about the battle between James Hunt and Niki Lauda for the Formula 1 world championship in 1976, was very watchable. Not Le Mans ’66, though. The above quote from Peter DeBruge goes on to say admiringly of Mangold’s protagonists, that ‘these two go big with their performances’. I’d say too big (Bale) and not big enough (Damon). In any case, they’re thoroughly upstaged by the cars. After an hour, I gave up.
21 November 2019
