“F1” is well on its way to becoming one of the classic sports films of all time — and that’s precisely why one of the top critics in America loathes it.
The auto-racing film, starring Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, and Damson Idris, was already on track (pun intended) for a big open, both with advance hype and the box-office provenance of director Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick“) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Deliver it did, with $57 million domestically and $146.3 million globally in its first weekend. Apple’s biggest box-office draw to date, the film did cost $250 million to produce and will likely need a strong run in theaters in addition to its presence on Apple TV+ to make a profit — but it’s already well on its way there, unlike other high-profile flops this summer. (Looking at you, Pixar.)
“‘F1’ is going to be Apple’s biggest release at the box office by far,” movie consultant David A. Gross told Variety. “This film looks like the successful business model Apple has envisioned and wanted to execute for several years.”
The film itself is predictably fun in the same way that “Top Gun: Maverick” was: It’s an unabashed formula film (pun unintended this time) about Sonny Hayes, described as “the best that never was” after an accident sidelined his career decades ago. He makes a comeback with an underfunded, underperforming team. You’ve probably seen a movie with these story beats before — “Top Gun: Maverick” included — but it does it so well that you come away loving it for simply being great at what it does.
For ardent fans of the F1 circuit — myself included — be warned that the film is to the actual spectacle in the same way “The Mighty Ducks” was to the 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team. But this is exactly why I ended up loving it: that it’s just a simple, fun time at the movies, something which Formula 1 arcana would decidedly get in the way of. To get really into the sport requires not just an appreciation of cars driving around a track, but a memorization of trivia, physics, aerodynamics, and bylaws that makes the “Star Trek” fandom look quaint by comparison.
The running joke among F1 fans regarding the sport’s tangled thicket of regulations goes something like this: “What part of rule 29.3, part C, section II did you not understand?” (That is a real rule, by the way — about limiting the usage of replacement parts over a season and ensuring that proper logs are kept of repairs to existing parts so as to not disqualify a driver for using a repaired part as opposed to a replaced one. You may begin to see why verisimilitude was not preferable on this project.)
Neither The New York Times nor writer Manohla Dargis are given to this kind of geekery, so what’s their excuse? Well, according to them, the film is problematic because it’s good and because it’s fun, which is something cinema doesn’t — and, one can suss out via Dargis’ tone, shouldn’t — exist for anymore.
Set in the world of Formula 1 racing, the easy, oh-so breezy “F1: The Movie” wants you to believe that it’s about winning and losing, talent and teamwork and all the tough love and hard work that go into Grand Prix glory. That’s the pitch, though there’s both more and less at play. An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.
Have you seen “F1” yet?
At once calculated and almost touchingly sincere, the story is as formulaic as its title subject. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a driver who could’ve been, should’ve been, a world-class contender. Recruited for service by an old pal, Ruben (a silky Javier Bardem), Sonny gets one last proverbial chance to prove himself while facing the customary hurdles, including his past, a wary crew, a corporate tool and a hungry young rival. There are crackups, breakdowns, near-misses and some well-lit darkish nights (well, minutes) of the soul. Three women have decent speaking roles; all share at least one meaningful moment with Sonny.
Ah yes, the subtle invocation of the Bechdel test. Could we have worked a deaf, nonbinary driver in, too? Because that’d be great. We also need to stop the film for at least 15 minutes for them to give an impassioned monologue on male cis privilege.
The review goes on to say that the “whole sleek package is as hackneyed as it sounds,” as if one was expecting a Brechtian deconstruction of capitalist greed for a film about state-of-the-art cars zooming around tracks filled with beautiful scenery. Please do look at this paragraph and ask yourself if there’s any iota of fun this critic won’t subject to narrative theory:
To that end, the director Joseph Kosinski showcases Pitt like an old-studio attraction, bathing him in pretty light, putting him in signifying outfits — think of a coyly grinning, blue-jeaned Robert Redford circa the 1970s — and at times stripping off some of that clothing. Kosinski buffed Tom Cruise to a similar high gloss in “Top Gun: Maverick.” As in that movie, “F1” deploys its star for a classic setup between an individual and a community, one in which a loner-outsider rides in to deliver wisdom and near-mystical gifts.
And just so we’re clear here, let me give you the first paragraph of reviews of two recent films Dargis loved rather unashamedly:
In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, “Sorry, Baby” is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift. It’s an outwardly unassuming story of a woman, Agnes, grappling with the aftermath of an assault that has rearranged both her head and her world without destroying either. The movie has moments that can make you wince, but it’s often wryly and tartly funny because life is absurd and complicated, and people are, too. Something horrible happened to Agnes, and that horrible thing remains in her, body and soul. It changed how she lives, has sex and sleeps. Yet every morning it’s still Agnes who gets up; she’s still here. …
In “Caught by the Tides,” the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in “Caught by the Tides,” a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.
Not that there’s anything wrong with independent cinema (although it does give itself to too many films which “South Park” famously described, years before “Brokeback Mountain” came along, as “gay cowboys eating pudding”-style self-indulgent didacticism), but she’s also being paid to advise the Times’ not-insubstantial audience — sadly the de facto paper of record for America, like it or not — about what films they’ll enjoy, not what films they can patiently endure to acquire cultural capital.
Lo and behold, audiences like one type of film and run away, fast, from the other. This will teach critics nothing, doubtlessly, and they’ll continue to wonder why people stay away from the movie theaters long after most other forms of entertainment have bounced back to pre-pandemic levels of engagement.
While I have not seen “Sorry, Baby” or “Caught by the Tides” yet, I can imagine you — whether or not you know all about rule 29.3, part C, section II or think that kind of thing is for dorks like me — will probably enjoy “F1” more than you will something like a “soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament” which “can seem like a gift” to reviewers such as Dargis.
While I’m picking on her because her review was the most specifically clueless, she’s not the only one who’s basically given the movie backhanded praise at best because it deigned to be fun. The fact they think that’s a problem is indicative of why people think the media is out of touch.
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