Le Mans ​’66

In the year of our Lord 1977, the BBC launched a week­ly motor­ing mag­a­zine show called Top Gear, which was essen­tial­ly 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 this one, and so focused instead on the nat­ty, chum­my rap­port between Shel­by 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 Shelby’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.