The Dead Don't Hurt

To the End of the World

or

"How Was Your War?" "Too Long. How Was Yours?"

 

It starts out very quietly before we see anything. The sounds of Nature. The slightest of breaths.

 

A knight rides through the woods on horse-back, a little girl waiting for him.

 

It is the last thoughts of Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps, she of Phantom Thread), French-Canadian florist/bartender/mother/cook/carpenter/pioneer-woman. She is tended to, watched over, then mourned by her common-law husband Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), Danish carpenter/soldier/sheriff.

 

Vivienne is dead. And the man Olsen wants to kill, Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod) has just killed five people at the local saloon, as well as the deputy sheriff of the town. He's the son of a local rancher, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) and just no damn good. The mayor, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston, in a performance slightly reminiscent of his father), who has business dealings with the man can't have such a massacre go unpunished, so he informs Olsen, who is in the process of burying his wife, of what happened, and assures the sheriff that they have the man who did it. A rather dim employee of the rancher volunteers to take the rap, never realizing that he might be hanged to save the son's neck. Olsen turns in his badge in protest. He has work to do.

 

Being Sheriff will just get in the way.

Sounds like a "typical" Western, doesn't it? But The Dead Don't Hurt, written/directed/starring Viggo Mortenson*, is only familiar in outline form and goes about things quite a bit differently. Mortenson strips away the rituals of Westerns, the shoot-outs, the robberies, the culture clashes with Natives, the chases (other than a brief one), the courtliness between men and women, and shows us the bare-bones and foundations of building a life in the wilderness, where people by necessity are "gig-workers" making use of whatever talents they have to scrape a living out of the dirt. You have to be tough, resilient, and oh-so-patient to eke out an existence, using Nature but fighting it back lest it overcome you.

Mortenson's characters have depth. They seem to have lives off-screen when we don't see them, histories and, hopefully, futures. More is spoken across someone's face than from their lips. And as there is not one Native in the entire movie, it drives home the point that the country was re-tooled under the auspices of immigrants, bringing their pasts with them. The film even feels like a "foreign" film, concentrating on the small moments, lingering on the consequential ones, and the violent ones are over in the time it takes to stop a heart.

There is another aspect to it that I like and always have been fond of—it's non-linear, starting with the death of one character and telling her story in flash-back, but not in an obvious, telegraphed way. The only way you can make the realization that a jump has happened is in paying attention to Olsen's facial hair, starting out with a brushy moustache, and his later, post-Civil War scenes, with a full beard, thus relieving any distracting questions ("Gee, what did he do with the kid?") that will pull you out of the movie—as I sometimes experienced. There are no exclamatory time-stamps holding your hand and making things obvious, but merely relying on the images on-screen to tell the story, the details of which orient you in situ.

I like that. And it allows Mortenson to juggle the story-line in a dramatic way to allow the story to evolve and not be fronted solely by a love story and back-ended by a revenge plot. Time stretches, evolves, and we learn more in this structure than by a simplistic start-middle-end timeline. Things seem to matter more. The character of Vivienne seems to matter more, as she is the center around which the movie revolves.

And in this structure, the film feels more like a memory, a totem of the woman we see dying in the beginning. Despite her early demise in the film, we see her life unfold in the flashbacks, the decisions she makes, the things she endures. It's really her film and the character haunts it—like we're seeing it play out in the moment of her death. And the performance of Krieps is a wonder to behold, played out with restraint, choosing her battles, internalized, not being dramatic about it. Enduring. It's a cliché to say that it's an award-winning performance—it has to be recognized first, and to do that, people have to see it, and I doubt the movie will get the attention it deserves to garner her such acclaim.

Which is a pity. This is already one of my favorite movies of the year (it clicks so many of my "this-makes-a-good-movie" boxes, which run counter to the adrenaline-fueled roller-coasters that drive the weekend box office figures), and I wish people will go out to theaters to see it. It's a big screen movie—especially with the sound—and it will lose a lot on a small video screen, and—god forbid!—on a telephone. It's an appointment movie, where time needs to stop to appreciate it and take it in. But, we live in a different time and a different sensibility than the one portrayed.

More's the pity. But, the mysteries of The Dead Don't Hurt are still percolating through my mind, and it may take another visit to fully appreciate just how good it is.

 

I can't wait.

* He composed the music, too...and is one of the musicians who played it.  

Knox Goes Away

Schrödinger's Murderer

or

"Did You Bury This Guy?" "No. Why?" "'Cause If You Had, I'd've Dug Him Up and Killed Him Again."

Knox Goes Away is a lot better than people say it is.

Michael Keaton's second directed film—his first was the little seen The Merry Gentleman—is another pulpy film noir about a hit-man. The first (which Keaton basically took over when the original director was incapacitated) was more of a character study, contrasting its hired killer becoming something of a guardian angel to a woman in need of protection. But, as opposed to the first, this time director Keaton's fully committed and this one is more of a puzzle film, with Keaton's contract killer, John Knox, having to solve two problems simultaneously, both as them as personal as could be. 

It's not territory Knox is familiar with, as he's as cold as they come, not even wanting to know about the individuals he's hired to kill. He doesn't need a reason, as much as his partner Tom Muncie (Ray McKinnon), tries to justify the murders they've been hired to commit ("because in ten minutes, Tommy, he's not gonna be anybody"). He just does the job, cleans up the scene to avoid suspicion, then goes away. He's a bit of a ghost. The record has him ex-Army ("Deep Reconnaissance Officer") and he did a stretch for tax evasion (of all things) but, given his trade, it could have been a lot worse.

But, Knox is smart. He's extremely well-read—someone says he has 10,000 books in his house—majored in English Lit and History and he has the nickname of "Aristotle" that he got in the Army for always having a book in his hand. And he survives by his wits. His assets are all neatly tucked away, and he has few strings attached—he had a wife and kid, but they've been out of the picture since prison—except for co-workers, like Muncie, and "acquaintances" in the business. There's a hooker (Joanna Kulig), who shows up like clockwork every week (Knox lends her books).

He survives by his wits. But, his first problem is they're starting to fail him. A visit to a neurologist and an E-ticket through an MRI gives him good news and bad news—he doesn't have Alzheimer's (as he feared), he has CJD—Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—which is worse. Statistically, 70% of people die within a year of diagnosis, but Knox has weeks, not months. The forgetfulness will increase, there'll be hallucinations, coordination issues, vision problems...then dementia, palsy, coma, then his brain will just stop making him breathe...The Big Erasure. "I'm sorry," the neurologist says lamely. "S'okay, Doc" says Knox. "Even if I hated you for telling me, I'd forget soon enough."

Knox keeps it quiet. He tells Muncie their upcoming job will be his last one—that he's "going away" (truer words...)— and then he'll start "putting his affairs in order" as the doctor recommended. But, that last job of his goes bad, he screws it up when he has "an episode", proving that he's not too good at this "death" business when it happens to take the lead. He makes due with the clean-up, for all the good it'll do, but it's botched and there's nothing he can do about it. The cops are gonna see through the inconsistencies and start looking around. He's losing it and he knows it. Now, he has to work fast.

Then, the other problem happens and it's one he can't ignore, as taxing as it is on his dwindling resources. In a way, it's a similar but more complicated scenario than the issues he had to just make-do with on the botch-job. But he has to get this one right. He cannot fail at this because it'll screw up everything else that he's planned in "putting his affairs in order." But, his disease will make the likelihood of screwing up that much more likely...and he has to be precise. He has to get it right.

So, he goes to an old contact in "the business," Xavier Crane (Al Pacino, doing some of the most subtle work he's done in ages). Crane is retired (although he keeps reminding Knox "you know I'm a thief"), but Knox asks him a big solid: look at his plans, check them, make sure they're right...and, if they are, check in with Knox...daily...to make sure things are going on schedule and monitor Knox's condition. Crane becomes caretaker to Knox and his plan...and it's one the old pro doesn't take lightly.

I'm not saying anything about what Knox has to deal with—for one thing, it's really spoilery, and for another, it's a bit problematic—it's a little too convenient that it happens just at that time (one keeps expecting a twist that says the whole thing's a set-up but it doesn't), but one could, if being generous, explain it away using the "life's what happens when you're busy making other plans" trope. But, everything is so inextricably linked that it's actually far more resonant than if all Knox had to do was liquefy his assets and make sure that everything is "clean."

What Knox does in the ensuing couple of weeks will only reinforce one's confusion about his condition—what is he doing? Why is he doing that? Is he losing it? Truth be told, he is, but he's working on a scheme he came up with years ago...with an awful lot of last-minute improvisation. But, he's gotta do it without screwing up. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, the cops—in the form of Detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura, who's so good) and her partner, Rale (John Hoogenakker)—are looking at how Knox "cleaned up" that last hit and it just isn't adding up as what Knox wanted it to look like. And they're starting to circle around Knox as the forensics start to come in, confirming their theories. It's just a matter of time, something Knox doesn't have.

Like I said, this one is better than people say it is. I don't know what the issue is—maybe it's too complicated for today's entertainment "journalists" or maybe a lot of the stuff just goes over people's heads, but it's a lovely exercise in how one deals with a "post-'Dateline'" world of micro-forensics, DNA research, cell-phones, and a security camera on every street corner. It's intricate without broad strokes and there are a lot of sly subtleties in the script, direction and acting.

Keaton's great in this, certainly as an actor, but—as he showed in setting up shots on The Merry Gentleman—he has a good eye for story-telling camera placements of a certain moody edge...without the burden of the "attention-getting" tricks that early directors fall prey to. I did have some issues with how he portrayed Knox's condition—it didn't seem like Alzheimer's to me—but then reading up on CJD with its dementia AND hallucinations, I could see what Keaton was going for. Marcia Gay Harden's in this and she's terrific as Knox's ex, James Marsden might be a tad too mercurial in his part (but he's supposed to be a hot-head) and Pacino plays his wizened mentor role with the former quiet intensity of his past. It's good to have that back.

I like it for its intricacies, its resonances, and the fatalism that should run through any good film-noir. And it is a film-noir, despite the sunshine and the surprising humor that runs through it (Nakamura's delivery, for example, is as dry as a bone). I'm thinking of one particular shot of Detective Ikari near the end that in contrast to the rest of the story shows what an uncaring Universe we inhabit, no matter our intentions and competence. That shot didn't need to be there, but Keaton kept it in, and it's heart-breaking given the rest of the film. That's noir, and this little film, slipping under the radar, manages to revive the form, staying true to its inherent world of cynicism, but seeming so triumphant.

The Blind Side

"98% Protective Instincts

The true story of All-American Michael Oher is the very stuff of feel-good uplifting movies. Impoverished son of a crack-addict mother and disappearing father gets a break by being so damned good at sports that a religious prep school is willing to look past his abysmal GPA (0.6 in the movie, 0.4 in real life). While attending, the homeless kid is given a place to flop for the night by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohey, and, basically, stays on, becomes family, and with their tutorship and support, gets his grades up enough to join sports, and the opportunities fall from the sky like linebackers.

The ads and the poster make it look icky, like Oher is the stray dog who just needs love from the do-gooder white folk, or worse, one of those "reverse Oreo" movies where the compelling stories of minority struggles are overshadowed by the white stars playing earnest observers.*

Fortunately, the movie is written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who made one of the best sports movies a few years back—The Rookie—and managed to salvage a bit of the abandoned Alamo project. As screenwriter of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and A Perfect World (both for Clint Eastwood), he's shown himself to be a writer who embraced quirk, then moved on to write compelling characters rather than walking exploited stereotypes. You like his unsentimental people and root for them no matter their hurdles.

It comes in handy in The Blind Side. Once Oher (Quinton Aaron) sleeps over one night, that's it, he's a part of the Tuohey family, no if's, and's and but's, and the matriarch, Leigh Anne (played by Sandra Bullock like a Kathy Lee Gifford with sass and a laser-eyes—she's what y'all call a "spit-fire"), walks the talk of her Christian upbringing in providing a practical resource for his needs. No argument is broached, no catty remark is left unchallenged, and schmaltz avoided at all costs. Bullock's Leigh Anne Tuohey is a Mama Tiger, the like not seen since Susan Sarandon's "Michaela Odone" in Lorenzo's Oil, to the point where all Hancock has to do is keep her in frame when she walks up to her kid's coach from the background and one begins to feel genuine fear. A revelation of the extent of Oher's poverty elicits a polite "Excuse me," a walk down the hall to her room, shutting the door and an erect sitting posture to indicate that no amount of bad news is going to get to her or deter her. Bullock isn't afraid to make her character cold or a bitch. She just is, take it or leave it.

But it's Oher's story, his character has more screen-time than Bullock, though far less dialogue, and Hancock found a god-send in Aron, who has a face the camera loves. Since he has to carry a hefty amount of the drama silent, it serves him well, and is a nice fit with Bullock's all-talk, but reserved expression, counter-point.

At passing glance, it looks awful, but in its straight-forward, unpretentious and un-preachy style, The Blind Side wins over any cynicism.

* I'm sure you can name one—Mississippi Burning, Glory, Amistad, Come See the Paradise, Snow Falling on Cedars ... the list goes on, ad nauseum.

Mud

Written at the time of the film's release....although I've added a couple of current addendums because this writer-director is so good and his work sought out.

Possession is 9/10 of the Law
or
Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places

The last film that Jeff Nichols wrote and directed was the very interesting, very odd, and quite layered Take Shelter.*  His latest, Mud, is part coming-of-age movie, part Southern Gothic, part classic romance and part tragedy and complete curiosity. It features a couple of great kid performances and a top-tier cast supporting them.

Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play two tweeners living on the Mississippi River. They're a couple of restless kids who are hired help in their families, but with minimal supervision, have the freedom to sneak out at night exploring. On one of those pre-dawn excursions they motor over to an island and find a wonder—a boat nestled in a tree. Checking it out, they're in for a shock. Someone's living there. 

That someone is Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who is eking out an existence there. How he got there is a mystery. Why he's there is not. He's killed a man, who was messing with the girl he loves, and that man has a powerful family (led by Joe Don Baker). He's hiding out, waiting for word from Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and when he hears, they'll run off together, where...well, that's a little unspecific. 

In the meantime, he uses the little go-betweeners to get food, supplies, and word out, that includes to one of Ellis' (Sheridan) neighbors, a solitary man named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), who Mud labels "an assassin." Blankenship calls Mud a liar, making Ellis slightly conflicted; he's willing to do anything for Mud in his quixotic quest, out of a young man's puppy-love instincts, in part a response to the fracturing marriage of his parents (Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson) and his own interactions with "townie" girls, particularly May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant).

It's to Ellis' advantage that he and "Neckbone" (Lofland) are under the radar of everybody's notice, his parents have other concerns and Neckbone's uncle (Michael Shannon) is in his own little world, so the two boys go back and forth between mainland and island with messages and supplies, which becomes increasingly complex when Mud decides he's going to get that boat out of the tree. And when Ellis, in his come-to-the-rescue way, interferes when one of the goons keeping an eye on Juniper gets aggressive with her trying to get information about Mud's whereabouts.

Things begin to spiral out of control to a conclusion that can't come to any good, despite everyone's best and worst intentions, due to the breaking of borders between the insular natures of the players.

But, there's something else going on here that creeps like an adder through the Louisiana swamp, something to do with misogyny. Maybe it's just the timing of events—not accidental as it's all in the control of the writer-director—but all the problems seem to generate from the war between men and women. The women here—Juniper, Ellis' mom, May Pearl—have an edge of capriciousness and undependability (in the males' eyes, anyway) that derails their plans and dreams. 

The men are hardly blameless, going through their lives with their eyes wide shut, totally aware that the women in their lives may prove disastrous in the short term, while they're quixotically playing the hero or the rescuer, anyway. Everybody has some romantic view of life that is not theirs, and their pursuit of it proves their undoing. One leaves the theater with the sense of a good story well told, but with a stake through the heart in the futility of good intentions. One wants the waters of life to be smooth and transparent, but the reality of it is that it's the consistency of the movie's title.

It's a beautiful film, too. Beautifully shot by Adam Stone. 

2021 note: Nichols hasn't made a film since this one and that's a real shame. He's been working on one film, but has been hired by John Krasinski to make A Quiet Place, Part III. Well, whatever gets him back behind the camera. His work is too good not to be making something. Whatever it is, it is of worth.

* I should mention here in 2021 that he's also made a couple other film's I've loved—2016's Midnight Special and the same year, Loving.

News of the World

When the Reckoning Comes

or

"To move forward...you must first remember"

It is 1870, five years after the Surrender at Appomattox Court House, and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), late of the 3rd Texas Infantry, is making his way between Indian Territory and Texas with ultimate goal of reaching—maybe—San Antonio. His peculiar job is to read the news as he travels from town to town, charging the attendees a Liberty dime for the privilege of hearing news that might not otherwise reach them by post or by messenger. He's careful about what he reads, as the bitterness of the Civil War still festers in the souls of the Southerners, only enhanced by the presence of "Blue Coats" maintaining military order in the restless, discontented villages. What Kidd finds in his listeners is a belligerence, born of Union occupation without any promised Federal help, if anything, Federal interference. When protests break out, all he can do is assuage and sympathize and encourage. "Times are hard. We all need to do our part. All of us. We're all hurtin'. These are difficult times."

He might as well be speaking to us.

Outside of Wichita Falls, he comes across a wagon overturned by some violent, unnatural means. He dismounts, warily taking his rifle, and moves down the road, ears sharpened and eyes peeled for signs of life...or malice. What he finds is a black man hanging from a tree, with a notice that Texas is a White Man's Territory. He has barely enough time to register this atrocity when a rustle in the scrub alerts him to someone else watching him. It is a young girl (Helena Zengel), blond, dressed in buckskin, and resistant to being captured, although capture her he does. The wagon's contents contain papers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, giving the responsibility of returning this girl—named Johanna Leonburger—recently survived of a raid on Kiowa land to her nearest kin, allegedly living in Castroville, Texas.

A passing Union patrol provides no help, and just instructs Kidd to take her to the nearest Bureau office and drop her off, even as he protests that he can't be bothered with transporting a child—a child twice orphaned as it happens. The patrol has other concerns and his aren't theirs. At a checkpoint, Kidd talks to the closest Union official and is informed that the Bureau rep is on the reservation and won't be back for three weeks, so Kidd can either stay or deal with it himself. He chooses the latter, grousingly, and gets outfitted with a wagon, supplies, and a contraband gun—Kidd only has bird-shot in his rifle—by a former Infantryman of his, who warns him that the kid is wild, and then is proven right, when "Johanna" disappears while Kidd is off reading the news. Kidd finds her that night in the pouring rain on a riverbank pleading with a passing Kiowa caravan to take her back, that neither hears her, nor seems to care.

That burden, that pilgrimage, takes up the bulk of News of the World, maybe the most leisurely film director Paul Greengrass has ever made (but then he hasn't made a Western before...). Adapted—rather freely—from the best-seller by Paulette Jiles, it follows Kidd and Johanna (her Kiowa name is "Cicada") on the long trip to Castroville, episodically beset by obstructions natural and man-made that impede their journey, usually in the vicinity of some hard-scrabble settlement that will one day turn into a strip-mall suburb in modern Texas.

Greengrass' game-plan is simple: begin with a slow drone-driven shot of the landscape (most of the film was shot in New Mexico), then locate Kidd and kid in it, and take it from there. The hardships include a gang of ruffians who seem hell-bent on buying (if it comes to that) Johanna for their own purposes, an abattoir of a settlement slaughtering buffalo and ruled by an autocratic kingpin, a wagon disaster, a Kiowa band that keeps an eye on them, and a sandstorm that seems to come out of nowhere...all that besides the usual hazards of running out of provisions—especially water—and the usual feeding schedules of horses.

Only in the wagon-wreck is there any semblance of the Greengrass shaky-cam, cuisinart-editing that we've come to associate with his Bourne films or past work. The camera is still a might' restless, but, generally, the film provides good screen-capture material without the customary blurring that usually comes with Greengrass. It's not leisurely, by any means, and the editing still cuts away just before you expect it to, which provides a fair amount of subliminal tension, even if you're wondering just how long this trip is going to be without a bathroom break.

But—as in a lot of Westerns—it's the journey that's important. There's more to Kidd's traveling than news-gathering. He's avoiding something, going back to San Antonio, where he left his wife to go off to war. He hasn't been back since, and the extended travel gives us time to slowly come to terms with Kidd and to Johanna and their shared slice of life and journey. They're both untethered souls—Kidd with his memories and Johanna, twice-orphaned and belonging nowhere, form a bond of necessity and circumstance.

As they travel, Kidd tries to teach her English, and to that end—and because it makes her responses easier—he learns Kiowa, and is stunned to learn that she also can speak a little German, remembered back from before her first family was killed in a Kiowa raid, and, once adapted into a Kiowa family, seeing them killed in a Cavalry ambush. Though they're traveling the same path, Johanna's retraces the past, while Kidd's journey is one trying to forget it. Same route, different destinations.

Hanks' character in the book is supposed to be 71, and that's a far stretch for the actor. The screenwriters make him younger, without the long history of soldiering; Hanks' Kidd has had enough of it with his participation in the most recent one. Hanks does lend a weary, lived-in feel to his Kidd, but is so internalized that he's a bit of a mystery. Hanks is best when he has someone to play off of, and his work and the movie come alive when he comes across his stray charge, who's short of talk. Zengel has a performance both studied and spontaneous, where it seems like she's making it up as she goes—despite having to speak in three languages, English, Kiowa, and German—it is a naked and guileless performance. I don't care how good Hanks is, the movie lives and dies by her work in this film, and the movie seems to heave aloft whenever she's on the screen. 

News of the World doesn't jolt along as most Greengrass films do. It meanders, but doesn't poke. And has that tense element of film-storytelling that entices: with a big frontier out there, wild and loose, what will happen next, what lies around the next bend? With the nation cleaved in two, suspicions of the next stranger you run into, the corrupt grasping for power, and a sizable distance of time and space between rumor and truth, anything can happen, and one's hopes and future can seem, at best, tremulous. 

What strikes one as one watches News of the World unfold is that nothing has changed much...except the guns have gotten better.

Ford vs. Ferarri (LeMans '66)

A Spanner in the Works
or
"Am I On Fire?"

Not a "car-guy." Never have been. Give me an engine and four wheels and I'm happy. I don't associate myself with horse power, don't give a damn about "cubes," and don't equate my manhood with the make and model of what gets me around.

And I'm enough of a cynic that, although I have a model of James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 sitting on my window sill, I resist the urge to see if it's leaking oil on its base as per its reputation (it's not that accurate!). For me, if it goes, it's good.

So, racing movies leave me cold. Whether The Crowd Roars or Speedway or Grand Prix or Le Mans or Herbie: Fully Loaded, they're empty movies with a lot of hardware beauty shots and cardboard characters who can't really explain the pull of the mystique of racing, when it boils down to making a lot of left turns at high speed.

Ron Howard's Rush came closest to a good racing film because, although it had its own fair share of carburetor-porn, it was about two racers with a love/hate relationship that lasted over years and tracks, and how the two bickered and supported each other owing to their personalities and how it extended over the years because, and in spite of, the competition. They saw each other's value beyond who was first and who was second.

So, at the end, racing movies have had a checkered past.

But, director James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari is the first one I've seen that is entertaining, has its requisite gross weight of Ford/Ferrari fetishism, and even turns the corner on attempting to communicate the need for speed and the intellectual pursuit of putting as much potential energy into a motor engine.

The story, which is based—for the most part—on fact, tells of how the Ford Motor Company, under the leadership of Henry Ford II (in the film, Tracy Letts), and at the urging of Lee Iacocca (played in the film by Jon Bernthal), sought to change the image of Ford, which had suffered set-backs in the family-vehicle field, especially with their Edsel model. Iacocca saw Ford as staid and wanted to make it hip and jazzy to appeal to the Baby-Boomers who were just entering their market share. For Iacocca, it was a matter of style over substance and he wanted to push the planned "Mustang" model as pure "sports-car" material by pushing it into racing. This was to attempt to bite into the Italian car-market, especially Ferrari, whose cars had been dominating the 24 hours of LeMans.

After Iacocca fails to come to terms with Enzo Ferrari over the acquisition of his car company, it turns into a grudge match—Ford II becomes determined to beat Ferrari at LeMans—and Iacocca turns to former LeMans winner Carol Shelby (Matt Damon) to modify a Mustang GT to compete at the French race, and gives him 6 weeks to do it.

It is a daunting task, and to drive, Shelby turns to Ken Miles (Christian Bale) a professional driver and mechanic who is brilliant at what he does, but is self-described as "not a people-person" (which, if I recall, was not a phrase used in the early 1960's). Uncompromising, a perfectionist at engineering and on the race course, Miles thinks making a Ford car race-worthy is an impossible task ("unless you got two, three hundred years"), especially given the corporate group-think entrenched at Ford.* 

But, an IRS lien of Miles' garage makes him think twice, and he takes on the job, rubbing—as he does—the Ford execs the wrong way. Those middle-men—especially Leo Beebe (played by Josh Lucas) tolerate Miles' tinkering with the T, which he feels has potential when working with Ford engineers and the Shelby team to shave the design of the model, while also fine-tuning the engine to achieve maximum RPM's. But, when it comes to Miles actually driving the car in the race, that's where they drop the yellow flag. Miles is not a "Ford man," he's not a team player. So when the first race-prepping for LeMans occurs, Shelby is strong-armed to replace him with a more "acceptable" driver...to the Ford execs.

The result is not a "win" putting the entire racing project into question—especially when Ford II's ego is on the line—and Shelby has to use tough-talk and a challenging personal relationship with the CEO to not compromise in his efforts, especially in response to the interference of Ford middle-men.

It's an interesting dynamic. Innovation against corporate interests, all engaged in their own war with different concepts of what constitutes "winning," and pushed to the point where the very goal of winning is in jeopardy as compromise compromises the intended goal. For all the "we're all on the same team here" happy-speak, it is impossible if the goals are different. Sometimes, getting your way gets in the way.

Getting in the way is only a defensive measure on the race-track. And how Ford v. Ferrari characterizes Miles makes him the perfect-combination of driver-engineer, able to perceive not just the performance of his vehicle, but its potential to outlast and out-perform his competition, giving him an advantage in moments of opportunity. The race sequences are thrilling and kinetic, and, combined with its emphasis on character and stakes makes it far more involving than most films of the type coming down the pike.

And Ford v. Ferrari is unique in that it manages to convey that adrenaline kick that fuels drivers and their love of the competition. It does that so well, it should also should have a warning suggesting a designated driver for the ride home. 

Damon and Bale, Miles and Shelby

* Yeah, yeah (I hear you say) how are the performances. Terrific. Damon calls forth his inner Matthew McConaughey for the twangy, charismatic Shelby and Bale (rail thin again) is a wonderfully mocking Ken Miles—the person you come away remembering the most.