This is in many ways a meat-and-potatoes "Dad" movie - two guys get together to achieve something historic during the 1960s, the only female character of note is one of those men's wife who's job is to stay home and react while her man goes out and does things (possibly with a "you shouldn't be doing these things" speech somewhere along the line), there's some tertiary figures blocking them from making their achievement, and the climax is them finally making that historic achievement. It's a very familiar formula by now.
The thing is, though, that it can still work, and here it works pretty damn well. I am usually bored shitless by car racing and it's a tribute to the craft of this film that I wasn't bored by this - there's enough twists and turns of the narrative to keep hold through a two and a half hour running time. And both Damon and Bale as the two men in question are at peak performance - Bale hasn't had this much fun in a role in years. There's an obvious subtext here about the relationship between two men looking to innovate and the Ford Motor Company's preference for production line success, and it's not exactly difficult to extrapolate it. And in supporting roles there's strong work from Tracy Letts and Jon Benthal as the Ford execs, and, dammit even Caitriona Balfe (who, to be fair, has a somewhat better wife-role than a lot of the ones in films like these - the relationship between her and Bale actually feels real and lived in, rather than just a dramatic device).
For a film I was expecting to be vaguely adequate, this exceeded my expectations quite a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment