‘Ford V Ferrari’ Is The Perfect Film With One Major Flaw

Ford v. Ferrari is the ultimate popcorn movie, an old-fashioned thriller with blinding speed scenes filmed in-camera, instead of mocked up via CGI. The result is a satisfying melange of buddy film, corporate intrigue yarn, international jet-set glimpse, and good ol’ American ingenuity. Its 2½ hour run time has some critics pleading for a bathroom break, but audiences love it, with a tight story that almost literally flies by at 200 mph and 7000 rpm.

For a film crafted with so much care something crucially important is missing.

I had the chance to catch Ford v. Ferrari this week, and while so many things about the film were deeply satisfying, one element bothered me a little: the filmmakers never really conclusively explain why Ford decided to take on Ferrari in the first place. In the film, Henry Ford II, played laconically by the ever-adaptable Tracy Letts, seems suddenly to see the need to become a historical figure like his namesake grandfather, but the scene where he announces this revelation (which involves stopping an assembly line that appears to be putting together the staid and boring Ford Falcon) and for some reason tells the factory workers that he needs an idea that will propel the company into the future comes out of nowhere. For a film crafted with so much care to get the historical period just right, something crucially important is missing: The McGuffin.

The “McGuffin” is a term coined by director Alfred Hitchcock to denote the thing that drives the action forward. The McGuffin answers the question: why did this story happen in the first place, and why should we care?

I came to Ford v Ferrari with absurdly high expectations. My father was an executive for Ford in the 1960s at Dearborn World Headquarters, the very building where the action of the movie occurred in Henry Ford II’s office on the 19th floor. As a junior executive, he wasn’t privy to the high-level decisions, but the way he dressed and believed in The Ford Way in those days was conveyed perfectly in the film. Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles (played by Matt Damon and Christian Bale), free spirits working out of California, would undoubtedly have clashed with The Ford Way. The film gets this fact absolutely correct.

But the reason Ford needed to spruce up its image was only brushed upon, in a slide show (the 60s version of PowerPoint) narrated by a young Lee Ioccoca, who came to be known as the Father of the Mustang. The rot in the company was much deeper than the film conveys, which lowers the stakes for the story. The reality was that if Ford hadn’t had a hit like the Mustang in the mid-60s, and proven that the car could take on speed demons like Ferrari, Ford would have likely ceased to exist as an independent company.

The 1950s weren’t kind to Ford Motor Company. The “organization man” ethos that emerged from World War II and Korea fit far better with Ford rival General Motors, which governed by spreadsheet rather than fiat. As an amalgam of brands meant to appeal to varying tastes, General Motors crafted a corporate story in step with the times, offering cool cars for the emerging youth culture via Chevy; luxury cars for emerging prosperity in Cadillac; and sensible cars for families in Pontiac and Oldsmobile. In the minds of most consumers, Ford was still just…Ford.

Not that Henry Ford I’s legacy company was moribund. Ford played a crucial role in the war effort, retooling plants and crafting planes and tanks by the thousands. After the war, Ford was helmed by the famous Whiz Kids, a group of spreadsheet-toting bureaucrats who came out of the military to provide the discipline that gave a necessary lift to efficiency and to served almost as a regency while young Henry Ford II, grandson of the founder, came of age.

In that post-war period, something got lost—a sense of the magic of what a car could be: design, performance, speed. Ford became boring, sensible, expensive, dull. Henry Ford II’s team tried to solve the problem with a hit car to take on GM, but they ended up creating a product that became synonymous with failure. Sadly, the product bore Henry II’s father’s name: The Edsel. The poorly assembled beast rolled off assembly lines in 1957, just as American youth culture was taking over. No one wanted your father’s Ford anymore. And no one wanted to pay a premium for an unreliable and unattractive dinosaur. The Edsel program was abandoned by 1959.

It was the Edsel debacle, more than anything else, that forced Ford to rethink its strategy. The Edsel was the McGuffin. Because of its colossal failure, Ford hemorrhaged money, talent, and brand loyalty. Think of Apple Computer in the mid-90s before the return of Steve Jobs. The Mustang was to Ford as the iMac was to Apple. It was only after the debacle of the Edsel that Ford had the courage to clear out the corporate cobwebs and take the risk that would lead to Ford v. Ferrari.