Bumpy start, exciting on the turns, brilliant race to the finish.

Rating: 8/10 (21 November 2019)

Ok well... I found a fair bit of the script (especially in early scenes) way too expositional. Some characters rather one dimensional (e.g. Leo Beebe).
It doesn't help that Josh Lucas has the kind of eyes/looks that are too distracting, he should just be a model! Central casting was clearly in the hands of someone with a 'type', which meant the players sometimes looked like an Annie Leibowitz Vanity Fair centre spread of the fashion worlds glitterati.
The director seemed to want to include the 'Englishness' theme (properly recognising the British influence on racing at this period and elsewhere) a little too much, so Miles and Mrs Miles sometimes seemed to be trotting out shorthand for the same.
I know Bale was (is?) English, but his choice of regional accent (though it may have been factually correct, I don't know) jarred a little for me.
All that said, I did think Bale (who I don't ever really 'like' due to an inherent lack of warmth) was very good (as he usually is) and well cast; Damon was superb (AA nominee superb) in a more complex and nuanced role. Likewise Tracey Letts playing Ford, whom I know from the excellent 'Divorce'.
One thing that I never understood was that despite the film suggesting Ford was coming from a standing start, suddenly with no explanation a car arrives from England which is clearly the core of what became the GT40....what?!
I loved the style and the pace, the colour and the cinematography etc, and I thought the race scenes and the general race milieu were brilliantly depicted. I have seen The Times (London) critics dismissing the film as old fashioned etc, and as I say it has some clunky dialogue and characters get tells, but if it is old fashioned in any way, it is that it tells a story about people and their complexity and what it takes to deliver the extraordinary, rather than reiterate some fear based drivel about how the world will be saved by a morally ambiguous superhero in Lycra. So thank God for that.
Rather like many a good race, it had a bumpy start but got better and better and by the end I was gripped, standing on my feet and cheering (metaphorically). See it on the big screen and enjoy the race atmosphere.