F1

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F1 is not, it turns out, a film about the little used button on the top left side of your keyboard, a shortcut to the Help menu and a means out of many a computer-based crisis.  Disappointed?  I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news and I, too, had been looking forward to a new mega-franchise emerging from the kooky, ingenious mind of a screenwriter who had gone no further than his humble keyboard for inspiration. There are 12 Function buttons and I particularly thought F6 looked dramatically promising, while F8 has all the markings of a rom-com.  Ah, well.  Onwards….

F1 is actually about Formula One, the sport of driving extremely expensive cars at extremely high speeds around extremely dangerous tracks.  I’ve been in a few vehicular scrapes in my time and have little-to-no interest in driving fast or dangerously, as evidenced by my previous response to Michael Mann’s direction of Adam Driver in FERRARI, perhaps cinema’s most powerful example of nominative determinism when it comes to selecting creative projects.  But Jerry Bruckheimer (who introduced the screening in a short speech which included the word “embedded” no fewer than three times… thus forcing me to remove said word from my personal lexicon henceforth), writer/director Joseph Kosinski and star Brad Pitt - plus all the many, many drivers, owners and execs in Formula One, including Lewis Hamilton who is credited as a producer of the film - would say driving fast is just one facet of a good F1 racing team, the other qualifying attributes being strategy, design and engineering of the car, collaboration and the assessment and management of risk.

While the brand-improvement exercise for Formula One is all about presenting an ethos of teamwork and equitable professional environments (please put those memories of the sexting allegations against Christian Horner to one side, even if he is literally in F1…), I struggled to see many of these qualities in Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt, and yes, in another display of mind-boggling nominative determinism, he does indeed have daddy issues…) who is unbelievably immature, selfish and arrogant and takes absolutely immense, insane risks to his own life, those of his fellows drivers and presumably to every worker and audience member at the races in which he participates (if Ferrari’s 1957 performance in the Mille Miglia and entirely avoidable deaths of 9 people - including 5 children - is anything to go by).  It seems, for Sonny, it really is about driving fast and winning, no matter the risk or how patently obvious the risk might be (he is driving around a track at 360 km/h while his eyesight fails, ffs…) and I think it is unforgivable, tbh.  It is also illogical and suggests there are absolutely no safety regulations or drivers’ health and sight checks in Formula One, which is presumably untrue and will do nothing to help perceptions of the safety of the sport or of their brand.

The Formula One brand is big and F1 worked with Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull, loadsa other sponsors, the tracks at Silverstone, Monza and Abu Dhabi and the many drivers who are featured (briefly, thankfully… and whomever decided it was best not to try to eek a performance or any dialogue out of Lewis Hamilton, bravo… 🙌 😮‍💨 ) and I can’t help but think the most important and lucrative roles on F1 were those of lawyers drafting shedloads of access agreements, releases and licenses.  Certainly I’d bet a hundred times more hours were spent on deeds of assignment and contracts than on the script.  For sure. (It is about 80% exposition delivered by the sports commentators who detail every single element of each of the races, just in case we don’t know anything about Formula One or can’t get to grips with the complexities of driving very, very fast around the same course, lap after lap after lap…)

My (l)apathy (or even aversion…) towards car racing is not a barrier to enjoying the film de facto.  Take, for example, my high regard for Tom-Tom’s films set in the less than salubrious fields of fighter pilots (TOP GUN and MAVERICK, also directed by Joseph Kosinski, incidentally), sports agents (JERRY MAGUIRE) and marines (A FEW GOOD MEN), wherein an arrogant upstart identifies an ethical failing in his arena, addresses it at some cost to himself and makes a marginal, but important change to that particular world.  Sonny Hayes falls short of the successful archetype established by Tom-Tom: he is no Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, nor is he Jerry Maguire, nor Daniel Kaffee.  He is a desperately underdeveloped 60 year old (and dons outfits and jewellery almost as ill-advised as those Brad Pitt wears in real life, seemingly incapable of buttoning a shirt all the way to the top…) and he does not grow at all from the first scene to the last.  I love Pete, Jerry and Daniel because the scripts allow for their change, growth and ultimate redemption, while Sonny Hayes ends the film damned to eternity living alone in the filthy van in which we first meet him, still taking unconscionable risks to his life and the lives of those anywhere near him, and failing to offer even a modicum of improvement to the arena in which he operates.  Maybe this is what men aspire to? For my part, I despair for the Sonny Hayes of the world and I think we’d be better off without giving them star status, tbh, on the track (or screen) or off it.

There are good things about F1, of course, and if you have any interest whatsoever in driving fast or in Brad Pitt then none of my criticisms should keep you from the cinema (where we should all be going as often as possible to ensure it exists for future generations, whatever the quality of the fare, and even if what you are watching is more an over-egged advert/branding exercise than a movie…).  Go!  You’ll find popcorn there.  And air-conditioning.  And the film opens with Whole Lotta Love, which is a welcome reminder to listen to more Led Zeppelin.  And in the meantime, I’ll start plotting a twelve-part limited series about the Function buttons on my keyboard (Netflix’ll go for it, right?!  It’s definitely one for the streamers… 🙄).   

[No star-rating from me as reviews are under embargo and I’m classing this missive as a “social reaction” without really understanding what that means, but if I were to give F1 a function rating then it’d be somewhere between the renaming of a file and the search feature, I suppose…]