soccer – The Magnificent 60s

The stars aligned and with only a couple of minutes between features I was able to squeeze in a record-equalling four movies in a single day (excepting all-nighters of course) at the cinema and with one exception they were all well worth the ticket price.

Ferrari

Not really a motor racing picture in the mold of Ford v Ferrari / Le Mans ’66 (2019) or Rush (2013) but more of a domestic drama centering around a dramatic race. The acting is plum, Penelope Cruz (The 355, 2022) taking the honors ahead of Adam Driver (House of Gucci, 2021) though Shailene Woodley (The Last Letter from Your Lover, 2021) seems miscast. The climactic race doesn’t carry the punch of Le Mans, however, the focus more on the backseat players than the drivers. And it’s not quite prime Michael Mann (Heat, 1995)

Set about decade before Ford v Ferrari, it finds Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) coping with the death the year before of his only son, the potential collapse of his business, and trying to conceal long-standing mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) from long-suffering wife Laura (Penelope Cruz).

The depth of the couple’s despair at the loss of their son can be measured in the fact that every morning they take flowers, separately, to his graveside. He has at hand an immediate substitute, having fathered a boy, now approaching ten years old, with his mistress, but rejects the chance to officially gave the boy his name.

The manufacturing side of the business was always viewed as merely a way of financing the racing, Ferrari having been a driver earlier in his life. But overspending or lack of income, such details are not specified, has pushed the business towards bankruptcy and he toys with inviting a merger with a bigger company such as Fiat or Henry Ford (which formed a central plank of Ford v Ferrari). But the easiest way out is to win Italy’s most prestigious race, the Mille Miglia, a four-day 992-mile event that ran clockwise across public roads from Brescia to Rome and back.

But I had to look that up. Unlike Le Mans, unless you are a racing aficionado, this doesn’t immediately click in the public consciousness. And there were a host of other details that seemed to skimp on information. Unlike Ford v Ferrari where you learned exactly how fast cars got faster and what it took to drive them or be driven in one (witness Henry Ford’s terrifying hurl), here you are only given some vague technical data which makes little sense. There is little background fill, Maserati pops up as Ferrari’s chief rival but its inclusion is almost incidental. In fairness, you do get more about the jiggery-pokery of running a business.

Running parallel to the racing venture is the family soap opera, will Laura find out about the mistress and child, will she jeopardize the business out of spite. Once the race starts, it’s hard to keep up. Here the distinct lack of detail hurts the most, although there is one shocking scene.

Engrossing enough but it’ll struggle to fill cinemas.

Anyone But You

A contemporary take on the rom-com with the disgruntled participants of a one-night stand forced to pair up at a wedding where they encounter an abundance of exes and various interfering family members. Glen Powell, star in the making in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), comes good as does Sydney Sweeney (The Voyeurs, 2021). Skipping the raw rudeness of its immediate predecessors, this pivots on charm, but with a few helpings of humiliation (he strips naked to avoid a predatory spider) and slapstick thrown in, plus some old-style determinedly un-woke action from one parent in particular. He is the more vulnerable, a poor swimmer, requiring a soothing song to fly. The plot is over-plotted and occasionally it seems some incidents have come straight from Room 101, but generally it works. Probably it helps, if I’m permitted of offer such a comment, that they are A-grade beefcake and cheesecake, respectively. Setting that aside, they appear to have mastered the lost art of the rom-com and certain drew appreciative laughter from the audience I was part of. the kind of film that in the olden days would have picked up a sizeable audience on DVD and turned into the kind of cult that guaranteed a return joust.

One Life

A film of two halves when it should have been divided into three-quarters and one-quarter or an even stiffer division. Concerning the efforts of the “British Schindler” Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn playing the younger version, Anthony Hopkins the older) to smuggle out of Prague over 600 Jewish children at the outbreak of World War Two. The earlier section is far more gripping and the later section that revolves apparently around an attempt to publicize the previous rescue in order to highlight the plight of later refugees falls mostly flat on its face as it seems more intent on glamorizing the actions of a man who wanted anything but public recognition. Too much time is spent pillorying a society that sanctified such inanities as the long-running That’s Life television program when I felt it would have been more sensible, and fair, to devote more attention to the work of Winton’s collaborators. While the climactic scene where Winton meets, as grown-ups, the children he saved is moving, it feels redundant compared to the actual children-saving.

Next Goal Wins

Eventually, it turns into a feel-good picture but for most of the time seems intent on making fun of Samoans carrying the tag of the world’s worst team. Nobody seems to ask why FIFA is so determined to bring football to countries where there is no interest in the game. Oddly, Michael Fassbender turns in his most accessible performance as the coach drafted in to improve the team, a big ask since he has clearly been a flop at his chosen profession. You could have pinned the movie more easily on the transgender player more accepted in Samoa than virtually any other country in the world who, by default, becomes the first transgender to play in the World Cup.

The best documentaries, rather than bombarding you with facts or indulging in endless repetition, allow you to draw your own conclusions. Sometimes you might take the opposite view to that expressed by the filmmakers. Or perhaps the producers were being deliberately ironic in entitling this Never Give In when one of the most notable features of the early part of the career of legendary British football manager Alex Ferguson is that he did the opposite.

Possibly, his own experience permitted to understand better the temptations lying in wait for the young players in his charge. For as a young player himself Ferguson went by his own admission “off the rails” and committed an act, somewhat glossed over in humorous fashion, that under his own regime would have been more heavily punished.

He was not, except for a couple of years, a great player. Signing up part-time for St Johnstone involved a four-hour-plus round trip to Perth three times a week, getting home at 1am and rising at 6am for his full-time job as an apprentice toolmaker in Glasgow. Over four years he notched up relatively few appearances, turning out for barely one-quarter of the team’s games, and so disillusioned that he started enjoying the nightlife in his hometown, even breaking the unwritten code of drinking the night before a game.

Because he couldn’t be bothered going all the way to Perth for a game for the reserve team he got a pal to pretend to be his mother and call the manager to say he was ill. The ruse was rumbled and, ordinarily that would have been the end of a less-than-promising career. But, through injury, the team was short a striker, Ferguson’s position, and the game was against Glasgow Rangers, whose ground was close to the footballer’s home.

The gods were on his side. He scored a hat-trick, won a transfer to another team where he did far better and eventually was signed for a record fee by Rangers. He fell out with them because he failed to carry out the job of man-marking an opposition player who scored a vital goal in a Celtic-Rangers derby. He doesn’t blame himself for this fundamental error but assumes that the club had decided to freeze him out for sectarian reasons, forgetting for the moment this was the same club that defied sectarian opinion in forking out a record fee for him in the first place. Big-time career over he eventually found his way into management and when the gods shined on him again made the most of it.

Ferguson, effectively the narrator, looking back on his career after his near-fatal brain haemorrhage, doesn’t always draw the same conclusions as the audience, which is always the main ingredient of the better documentary.

Ironically again, for a man who built, courtesy of Harvard, a post-managerial career as a wonder communicator, that aspect of his personality was occasionally lacking. His father refused to speak to him for the two years when he was throwing his career away by falling victim to temptation, a presumably the intemperate youngster was not going to be the one to heal the breach.

Lack of communication was the consequence of another incident at Manchester United when he dropped out-of-form goalkeeper Jim Leighton, who had previously saved the manager’s bacon countless times with his displays between the posts, for an F.A. Cup Final replay. Leighton never spoke to him again. Ferguson’s response: he did the right thing.

What comes across most effectively, though not quite in the manner Ferguson suggests, is his ability to bring a team together. Famously, he created a siege mentality at Old Trafford, “us against them.” What underscores that of course is “us vs ego,” the team rather than the individual, no player, as he so often stated, more important than the team, and on the few occasions that did occur quick to dispense with the player’s services.

One of his methods of bonding individuals from disparate backgrounds was to call on shared memory, not the water-cooler kind of shared experience, but to get his players to recall their working-class backgrounds, their fathers and grandfathers who had done decades of hard graft, in jobs, such as Ferguson’s own father, in shipbuilding, or mining, or mindless factory work, and of mothers who made sacrifices to ensure a child’s future and of both parents who invested so much time and money either shuttling their offspring to endless football matches or watching every single game they ever played before any manager came calling.

In a post-operative state, Ferguson hit on the single most important aspect of memory, not so much remembering who you are, but recalling in detail who are the people around you, and where they fit into your life, and you to theirs, and of your shared experiences, that unique bond, where the individual is less important than the family.

Ferguson, in the light of his achievements, probably deserves a 10-part documentary. But this will certainly do for a start, not the first documentary made about him, but the one that touches most on the subjective rather than the objective view. Given our later image of him as a dour individual it’s refreshing to catch glimpses of his younger self galloping across a pitch in sheer delight. While he doesn’t quite own up to his failings, they are revealed nonetheless.

I must confess that, having been given access to Amazon and being a proud Scot, this was my first port of call rather than, say, Lord of the Rings or the many contemporary films now streaming. Thereafter, one sneak peek at The Rings of Power was enough, the portentous dialogue about how ships float put me off entirely.

Tag: soccer

Quadruple Bill: Ferrari (2023) ** / Anyone But You (2023) * / One Life (2024) * / Next Goal Wins (2023)

Never Give In (2021) ***