If rigorous research is the hallmark of a quality product, the F1: The Movie should sweep the Oscars next year. It has little heft at its core, but it feels as if it is a heavyweight sports drama on a par with Chariots of Fire and Chak De, which it is not.
Brad Pitt’s involvement as producer and lead actor ensures the film an epic sweep in its storytelling. However, the film, though involving, eschews any intimate bonding between the audience and the characters. Apart from the film’s second hero Joshua, played intelligently by Damson Idris, I didn’t feel anything for the other characters, maybe on account of their constant search for activity.
No one ever slows down, and that’s a pity. There is a story here that never gets told.
Though supple in design, there is a strange sterility in the storytelling, as though everything is CG-induced. Emotions, when they appear, seem staged. There is a lengthy sequence where Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) tells the technical director of the racing team, Kate (Kerry Condon, giving more emotional thrust to her character than needed), about his past traumas. The entire sequence seems set up, as though designed to be that pitstop (Pitt stop?) in a sporty journey. More interesting than the romantic vibes between Sonny and Kate is the war of wits between Sonny and the young, brash, arrogant Mama’s boy Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) who wants to outrace everyone, including himself.
Here again, when Sonny and Joshua finally sit down for a patch-up, the sequence is written more as a poker game than a reconciliation.
The Sonny-Joshua generation clash is fuelled by an ongoing sense of something important happening on the race tracks. The various car-racing episodes are shot meticulously, though without fuss. Chilean cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who earlier won an Oscar for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, shoots the tracks with little drama.
There is a punctilious emotionlessness in the way the racing cars are shot, almost as though they had a life of their own, separate from the characters. This distant approach gives F1: The Movie an unusual, though not exceptional, aura of arrogance, as though we, the audience, are uninvited, though not unwelcome, guests at a party.
Unmistakably, F1 is a film with enormous resources. It is not just a vehicle for Brad Pitt to show us what he can do as an actor. If the truth be told, Pitt is hardly given an opportunity to display his acting chops in a film where he is the unquestionable hero.
While his character Sonny Hayes holds centrestage, he is not projected as a particularly likeable bloke. Twice in the first 20 minutes, Brad Pitt’s character is referred to as an ‘a..ehole’, and not without reason. Hayes is determined to do his own thing on the track even if it means breaking all the rules.
There is a hint of self-congratulation in Pitt playing a pr..k in his own production. Not only that, Pitt also surrounds himself with better actors than himself. Javier Bardem as the guy who hires Hayes, Tobias Menzies as the team’s snake, and Samson Kayo as Joshua’s manager, are exceptional.
If you are seeking a film that makes fun of our quest for a fun movie by placing the characters in exactly the situations we expect and perhaps want them to be in, then this is a good Pitt stop.
