Formulaic One

It is accomplished! And F1 is this year’s Oscar last-place finisher

[Eureka! I have now reviewed all ten Best Picture nominees: Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Sinners, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, and this stinker. Also I’ve done other-award nominees Blue Moon and Avatar: Fire and Ash. Almost ready for Oscar night, March 15!]

Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, like Roy Edroso, contains multitudes, but still I get complaints when I break form. A guy quit recently because he was sick of the comedy sketches! Likewise I bet some of you guys are glad I’m just about done with this Oscar movie thing for the year. But maybe even the killjoys will get some pleasure from this final review of the tenth Best Picture, because it’s this year’s Dumb Dad Movie Nominee and I’m not gonna do any deeper analysis than such a production deserves.

Starting in the mid-1960s and for decades thereafter, as if by unspoken agreement, each Oscar honors list included one film — at least one, but with remarkable regularity specifically one — that represented voters who were sick of all the newfangled artsy-relevant stuff and just wanted an old-fashioned that’s-entertainment extravaganza. Look at 1967: In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — and Dr. Doolittle! I imagine the Doolittle voters thought hippies and black panthers were coming to kill them and wanted a little light entertainment before the end, like Edward G. Robinson looking at pretty pictures before his suicide in Soylent Green. These were the voters who championed Hello, Dolly! the year Midnight Cowboy won, The Towering Inferno over The Godfather Part II in 1974, and so on.

Over the years, as the membership got younger and especially since the return to ten nominees, that constituency has somewhat mutated. Not gonna get too far into it now but in my estimation, Ford v. Ferrari in 2019 was the first nominee from what I call Dumb Dad Movies — skillfully made, tech-heavy crowd-pleasers that appeal to men who like loud noises and rapid movement but don’t want it to get too heavy like the artsy-relevant stuff the critics go for. 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick was the next in this line, and F1 is the current title holder. I predict the pace will pick up as flamed-out reactionary Gen X dudes increasingly take up their positions in IMAX stadium seats nationwide.

F1 returns to the vroom-vroom funsies of Ford v. Ferrari, but is even dumber and less effective. The buddy dynamic in the 2019 movie — Matt Damon’s Texas auto design nerd and Christian Bale’s Brit beatnik racecar driver — was a little quirky, at least, and it was fun to watch them take on the suits, i.e. the hidebound Ford factota and the stuck-up Ferrari pricks. But the F1 pairing of crinkly-eyed charmer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) and his old racing buddy Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem) doesn’t come up to even that level. Their first reunion, in which they pretend not to know one another and exchange sly third-person insults, is kind of cute. But once the plot machine gets revved up, there’s not really room for anything to develop from the relationship except further iterations of the old macho ass-pat.

Sonny was a golden boy of Formula One racing years earlier but had a spectacular crash and became a Lone Wolf, living out of his van and racing wherever and whatever he felt like racing, whether stock cars or the 24 Hours of Daytona endurance race, which he has recently won in laconic Lone Wolf, just-for-kicks style. Typical of the movie’s approach, this burnishes Hayes’ devil-may-care style but lowers the stakes — if he’s doing so well, why do we care whether he accepts Rubén’s invitation to do a bunch of Grand Prix, or makes anything of it?

Well, Rubén has stakes anyway — he’s got to get his ragtag APXGP team to win at least one of the nine remaining Grands Prix of the season or else lose his team. Plus we have the classiness of Formula One racing demonstrated to us — expensive gear, haughty executives, slick marketing —so even if Sonny’s not impressed, we know we’re supposed to be. Implausibly, despite not having raced Formula One in literal decades, Sonny believes he’s just the man for the job, or at least just the man to stride into the team HQ with his bag rakishly slung over his shoulder, eyes and grin crinkling like mad.

Before he wins a race, though, Sonny has to win the hearts and minds of APXGP people predisposed to think he’s a jackass. That includes the primary driver (this is a team sport, see — lots of opportunity for male bonding!), the Anglo-African golden boy Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris, cruising). Rubén tells Sonny that Joshua is talented but lacks maturity, which is why he needs a race bum living out of his van to teach it to him. Joshua reacts pretty much as you just did, though his mama (Sarah Niles in one of the film’s only dignified performances) thinks Sonny is handsome. Joshua is a bit of a showboat himself, albeit sans crinkles, and tempers flare, but by the time they do we know where this thing is headed are neither too worried nor interested.

Also Sonny has to win the heart of the hot chick — in this case Kate McKenna, team tech director with some flint in her manner and a lovely round southern Irish dialect, who sees through Sonny as who wouldn’t but eventually falls for his crinkles, especially as Sonny proves his worth on the track. I knew there was something buzzing under this otherwise flat character and was shocked to look her up and learn Kate was being played by Kerry Condon — so brilliant as Pádraic’s worn-out sister in The Banshees of Inisherin! Well, I guess this is what great international actresses have instead of Bond Girl opps these days. I look forward to seeing Renate Reinsve as Dwayne Johnson’s tennis coach.

There’s a bunch of racing, of course, in exotic international locales yet, and the cutting and camerawork on the races — along with a TV announcer’s detailed voiceover and the engineers’ electronic maps to show and tell us what’s going on, because it’s a bit tricky — make them involving. But I gotta say director Joseph Kosinski’s big trick of occasionally shooting the cars running at 200 mph by tracking from above in the opposite direction gets tiresome. (I bet in IMAX it feels like you might get hit by the cars, or at least grazed by their hoods.) Also there are nine races and once you get the hang of the thing, it loses some savor.

And the climax, which I couldn’t spoil for you if I tried, is supposed to be stakes-lifting but I found it comical. By then Sonny’s been experiencing bouts of double vision, which he hides from everyone so they won’t make him pull out of the climactic race and prevent him from endangering his life and that of anyone who happens to be near him on the track if he goes blind. (Prior to this we’ve seen so many crashes and wipe-outs and that at first I was wondering if Formula One was actually some kind of high-class demolition derby.) Every time the POV camera went schizo I found myself rooting for him to drive into a wall and, as his car burst into a ball of flame, the title THE END! to come rushing at us like in an old Roger Corman movie, which I’m sure is not what the filmmakers intended.

Special credit to Hans Zimmer, whom I previously knew only for his brilliant scores for movies like The Thin Red Line, Dunkirk, and Dune, who manages to get away with the most tedious Eurodisco dreck here, which I find very impressive.