Americanised racing completely misses the point

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2019)

Typically if you show me a decent trailer involving actors of the calibre of Matt Damon and Christian Bale, I will be at least interested in seeing more. Couple that with a film that appeared to stay faithful to racing's core principles and sparsely use CGI for stunts, I was then invested in seeing where this depiction of Le Mans '66 would end up going. My doubts, regretfully, were reinforced roughly halfway through the film: the plot had devolved, the characters inconsequential, and the on-screen action boiled down to a clunky contest between the "God-driven, hard-working" Ford company and their lazily-stereotyped adversaries at Ferrari.
Carroll Shelby (Damon), an ex-racer now mechanic/expert on the national circuit is recruited by Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to begin work on a racing outfit under the name of Ford. Interestingly, Bernthal (a highly regarded actor in his own right) was painted in the trailers as a key figure in this film - however, he is marginalised almost instantly, making the final product appear recut since shooting finished. Shelby recommends the British driver Ken Miles (Bale), a notoriously difficult but brilliant driver to race under Ford at Le Mans. However, a comically minor incident between Miles and Chief Exec Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) begins the most out-of-proportion grudge between the two, constantly trying to screw the company over for absolutely no founded reason other than they rubbed the wrong way.
This is the plot for the next 2 hours, interspersed with ugly stereotypes of either the English (through Miles and his family) or the Italians (portrayed as evil, scheming foreigners working under Enzo Ferrari's orders). This further ruins the realism of the entire film - am I really supposed to believe that the conglomerate that is Ford Motors is really the altruist in a story about the authenticity of racing? Further to this - isn't it beyond indolent to completely omit Miles' driving partners (Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme) in a film about a race requiring two drivers throughout? The narrative constantly eludes that "only Ken Miles is good enough to drive this race", and yet he is constantly partnered with someone who must have been as good to maintain their success.
The driving is almost secondary to the glaring errors throughout the film, but it does provide some relief from the cringeworthy American narrative. The cars do look authentic and rough; the clothing matches the era, and the design of the film on the most part is clean and period-accurate. This shouldn't really come as a surprise given the profile and budget of the film, and almost makes the real issue (something I wasn't focussed on but that my father did point out) even more glaring: the driving makes no sense. Miles will be "visualising" his perfect lap, smooth changes and steady racing, and then come race-day, will slam the gears in and yank the steering wheel round corners like nobody in an endurance race ever would. This, to me, is a killer to a film reliant on accuracy - you cannot expect the audience to respect your work if you yourselves cannot stay faithful to the source material.
I wanted to like this film. I am still waiting for a film based on cars or planes to really blow me away. Dunkirk mad me sure that this sort of cinema can be done well, but they need both a director who breathes the topic, as well as a production company willing to take the financial risk to fully commit to creating this sort of feature.