Williams

Don’t feel you need to have any inter­est in the world’s most tedious sport (motor rac­ing) to glean enjoy­ment from this prob­ing doc­u­men­tary pro­file of one its key play­ers, Sir Frank Williams. Direc­tor Mor­gan Matthews par­lays his event­ful life and times into this twisty-turny dra­ma which, from the off, is high­ly crit­i­cal of its vaunt­ed subject.

In fact, Williams is very close to being what in jour­nal­is­tic terms would be termed a hatch­et job, as this por­trait of the age­ing F1 scion is unflat­ter­ing to say the least. His sto­ry begins when, at a young age and on the cusp of penury, he dis­cov­ers the need for speed, and falls in to the very ear­ly motor rac­ing scene with some monied chums. Yet despite his own love of dri­ving hard, fast and out of con­trol, he nat­u­ral­ly falls into the role of car mak­er and over­seer, hir­ing dri­vers to enter (but sel­dom win) the races.

The film intro­duces the idea of a wide-eyed dream­er who is so utter­ly smit­ten by the smell of burn­ing rub­ber that lit­tle in life mat­ters a jot. And there is cer­tain­ly empa­thy to be extend­ed towards some­one who has dis­cov­ered a pas­sion and decid­ed to ded­i­cate every wak­ing hour towards serv­ing that pas­sion. And yet, as details accrue about his per­son­al life through inter­views and the tes­ti­mo­ny of his late wife, this image of the fer­vent inno­va­tor begins to frac­ture. A stark coun­ter­point is made between his vast pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess and vast per­son­al failings.

Even though the film leaves enough grey area for each view­er to make their own deci­sion as to whether Frank is a saint or a shit­bag, we’d be remiss to state that it errs far more to the lat­ter than the for­mer. The film has very lit­tle to say about F1, to the point where Clark­son acolytes might even feel a bit short changed. But it does tease out a saga about an inward-look­ing man who is entire­ly blind to the feel­ings of others.

Indeed, this film could well be renamed ​“nar­cis­sist”, so unspar­ing is its depic­tion of a man who is – and lets not mince words here – an A‑class, old, old, old school min­sog­y­nst. While off night and day play­ing in his sand pit, his long suf­fer­ing wife, Vir­ginia, talks about accept­ing Frank for who he is, but read­ing between the life, she clear­ly lead a lone­ly and love­less life (not least because Frank was some­thing of a tom­cat who prowled the pit­stops for tail).

Williams is built up of decent, detailed talk­ing head inter­views by friends and col­leagues, which help flesh out Frank’s obscure char­ac­ter. The choice to use recre­ation in scenes of Vir­ginia relay­ing her tales of woe are a weak point, as they only help to mud­dy the line between truth and real­i­ty, as well as con­firm that direc­tor Matthews is hap­py to deal with a very flu­id and fal­si­fied ver­sion of the truth. It’s a com­pelling watch, though, and like all good jour­nal­ism, you high­ly doubt the sub­ject likes it very much.