Ferrari:
Race to Immortality **
Dir: Daryl Goodrich. Documentary with: Richard Williams, Nigel
Roebuck, Doug Nye, Louise King. 91 mins. Cert: 15
This very authorised-seeming F1 documentary pulls up third
behind recent films on the McLaren and Williams empires, which may explain why
it often seems in such a rush. Of Enzo Ferrari himself, for one, there is next
to naught: nothing on where he came from, nor how he got into the sport, just
gnomic audioclips, choice onscreen quotes and biographical titbits that sketch
some vague philosophy about testing oneself against unknown forces. The focus
is almost exclusively on his star employees – those corner-cutting gadabouts of
the company’s late 50s golden age – which allows director Daryl Goodrich to
unspool reels of gleaming Kodachromed images of drivers in their trackside
pomp. Where August’s probing Williams
did so much to separate fragile man from fast machine, Goodrich’s more
misty-eyed, nostalgic endeavour never really gets under its subject’s hood.
What the film instead seems drawn towards – or perhaps can’t avoid – are those horrendous pile-ups that blighted the sport’s early decades, yet their framing here feels naggingly cursory. Where Senna’s crashes formed the basis of a major tragedy, and those in 2013’s Life on the Limit informed a wider investigation into F1 health-and-safety advances, Goodrich deploys his carnage as punctuating spectacle, shrugged off with a few plaintive piano notes as part of the job. (These death drives become so numerous you wonder whether the estate insisted Signor Ferrari remain invisible as a plausible-deniability measure.) It knows its target audience – hitting DVD shelves Monday in time to fill Dad’s Christmas stocking – but as a film it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.
Ferrari: Race to Immortality opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release this Monday.
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