A Miracle: F1
This elusive enchantment feels like all you need and words to describe it to yourself or your friends or Mum and Dad feel unnecessary.
Grade: A+
I didn’t know if I’d be able to write this review. It’s not because I hated F1 but because I loved it so much. I loved it too much.
When I stepped out of the cinema after watching it, I was filled with that feeling that’s harder than any other cinematic experience to put into words and that I’ve only felt a few other times in my life when rising from my seat after the lights have gone up. The other times were after I saw Oppenheimer, Dune Part II and Sinners. It’s that sense that after I’ve watched a film that I’ve had, to use Ryan Coogler’s very helpful gastronomical analogy, a full meal. I feel “so full, so filled” to quote the Red Guardian from this year’s Thunderbolts* (a film that left me neither full nor filled) and I glow with just this satiated wholeness sitting in my head instead of my stomach.
This elusive enchantment feels like all you need and words to describe it to yourself or your friends or Mum and Dad feel unnecessary. So do food and sleep. You feel like you could just live on the memories of that film.
Words are my arrows and quiver but sometimes my quarry is too quick and too large. That happened when I reviewed Oppenheimer, Dune: Part II and Sinners. I resolved that F1 would not do the same. I stalked my quarry for longer than I did any other, sitting with it, staring at it in my memory, pulling its sights and sounds up from my recollections well, and I think I’ve found the answer to why what it inspired me at first evaded my words. And I think I can put my discovery into one word: miracle.
Brad Pitt plays American race-car driver Sonny Hayes. After a horrific accident destroyed his promising Formula 1 racing career, Hayes now lives in his van, travels from place to place and migrates between racing jobs as the Western gunslinger once roamed the frontier travelling wherever he could sell his gun. Hayes’ old friend and F1 teammate Ruben Cervantes, played by Javier Bardem, finds Hayes at a laundromat on the road to his next job and asks him to join Cervantes’ F1 team APXGP (“Apex”). The film was written by Ehren Kruger from a story idea by Kruger and the film’s director Joseph Kosinski, and Kosinski and Kruger stack the decks against the APX team. The first time you see the team, which includes its technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), they’re groaning and scratching their heads over their “shit box” race car. They’re in last place and APX’s board will sell the team if they don’t start winning. Joshua’s already planning to jump ship. The press’s reaction to Cervantes bringing Hayes on board is: “desperate times call for desperate measures.” Everyone around APX is telling them and you: they can’t do it.
And no amount of wishing or whining on your part or the team’s will get them across the finish line in first place. Kosinski, like Christopher Nolan, Denis Villenuve and Ryan Coogler, seems to be a direct or indirect artistic descendant of Michael Mann. The world Kosinski creates in F1 is, like that of Mann’s LA in Heat, a post-industrial landscape where everyone and everything wears the stark whites, blues and blacks that have the hard and bright shine of race car engines, smartphone screens and Ray Ban sunglasses. It’s a world woven of steel and glass and where the unforgiving and impervious laws of physics, engineering, business and professional sport, which F1 racing combines, are the standard everyone is held to. “I climbed a mountain to get here,” Pearce tells Hayes after they lose their first race together. “Back home we call that a participation trophy,” Hayes tells him. He doesn’t say it with a hiss, only a smile and a slight dash of cheek. Hayes isn’t being an asshole. He’s just telling Pearce and you the truth: you either win or you don’t. You’re either fast enough or you’re not. Nothing else matters. It’s the harsh taskmaster Aristotle called the Law of Excluded Middle: either or. Either the team does what it takes to win or they don’t.
Yet when you look at them, you believe they can do what it takes. After seeing F1, you’ll want to be Sonny Hayes. Brad Pitt plays Hayes with a rough, rumbling and devil-may-care raw masculine charm. He’s part John Wayne and part Errol Flynn: strong jawed yet bright-eyed, direct yet playful, and someone who doesn’t bullshit but isn’t against playful teasing. Hayes is the swashbuckler and the gunslinger’s modern-day descendant. What does such a man do today when the Frontier and the Golden Age of Piracy are long gone? He apparently drives a race car, and, unlike the young and media-pandering Pearce, who’s a scion of our social media age, he doesn’t give long, lip-flapping, phony responses to the press’s questions about his opinions, feelings and private life and he goes on to the track with one plan: “drive fast.” Hayes is a paragon of an old spirit of independence. You could label it rugged individualism, but, whatever it’s called, at times it seems extinct in our modern age where people are making money off what others think of them and we’re relying more and more on machines and algorithms to do our work for us. It’s a spirit you’ve seen in other heroes of old, Wayne and Flynn but also Bogart and Gary Cooper, who conquered obstacles that seemed as impossible as that facing the APX team.
It’s in McKenna and Cervantes too. Playing McKenna, Kerry Condon looks and sounds like she’s made of pure grit and this is only helped by her tough yet melodic Irish accent. Her voice, Kruger’s dialogue and her tough-as-nails stare make her look simultaneously rugged and sexy, like a combination of the fiery Maureen O’Hara in John Ford’s The Quiet Man and the tough Hawksian women of Howard Hawks’ Western, gangster and war films from the 30, 40s and 50s. Bardem wraps his baroque manner around Cervantes’ unique mixture of a racer’s and businessman’s determination to win and he comes off as a less evil and more charming version of the ruthless sea captain he played in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. They and Sonny all resemble Pete Maverick who Kosinski resurrected for his previous film Top Gun: Maverick. They are determined individuals in a world where that seems to be going out of fashion and fighting to realise their dream of being “the absolute best” against seemingly impossible odds. They make you believe they can succeed with the way they speak and look at you.
Accompanying them all is Hans Zimmer’s score. Zimmer uses his modus operandi of building his score of Beethovenesque volume from a lean kit of just a few repeated notes but here his minimalistic maximalism has more poignancy when matched with these characters. The singularity of the beat played on Zimmer’s electric ensemble is the lone heartbeat of the Western gunslinger, the swashbuckler and the gumshoe fed through a synthesiser and translated into our modern codex. The heroes’ rhythm vibrates through the film. Thanks to Zimmer’s score, you feel it in every moment.
Kosinski used a special camera custom made by Apple to shoot the insides of the race cars Pitt and Idris drove, similar to how he captured the insides of the fighter jets in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does not just put you inside the car with the drivers. He captures the APX team’s fight to first place in shots looking at the drivers from the side and close up as the pit crew would be watching them and from the sidelines of the racetrack from a distance as the spectators would be watching them. Driver, crew and fans all want to see APX achieve the impossible and Kosinski shows you the story from all their angles. It triples the suspense you feel as you watch Hayes race towards the finish line.
“Ever seen a miracle?” Hayes asks Cervantes in the film’s beginning. Cervantes replies: “Not yet.” In Doctor Who, Matt Smith once said that sometimes impossible things happen and we call them miracles. The heroes of F1 are fighting to make the impossible happen. They’re fighting for a miracle. A miracle is a big thing. It was too big for my words, but I hope this time I’ve managed to pin it down on the page.