Austin Film Festival 2019 Day 8: Fuck the Man
I just saw two films about massive bureaucracies screwing over the little guy, and I am fucking pissed. I watched them back to back in the same seat at the same theater, and both inspired viscerally irate reactions that I was not expecting from Oscar bait studio films. On the surface, movies about auto racing and civil rights would seem to have very little in common. However, they both take the perspective of the common man eating the shit spewing downhill from a powerful bureaucracy attempting to assert its dominance.
Ford v Ferrari
Ford v Ferrari looks at the careers of Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles as Shelby’s small sports car manufacturer is enlisted by the Ford Motor Company to build them the best race car in the world. It’s the infuriating story of a colossally wealthy corporation purchasing a small company and ignorantly fucking it over at every turn, doing its damnedest to eradicate everything that made it unique and successful in the first place.
Overall, this film is a competently made studio picture and not much more. It’s predictable and nationalistic and kind of dumb, but the friction between Shelby and Ford really resonated with me. My favorite website Deadspin is currently dying a gruesome public death at the hands of a greedy, mindless private equity firm, which undoubtedly impacted my experience watching this movie. Deadspin was a profitable business with devoted readers that produced great content, but now it’s dead because its asinine parent company decided to issue some aggressively uninformed mandates altering the course of the website and alienating both its employees and readers. Deadspin was great because its employees had the freedom to write what they wanted. It was a sports site that didn’t shy away from stories about politics and culture and whatever else its writers found interesting. The parent company’s directive to “stick to sports” went against everything Deadspin stood for, leading pretty much every single writer to quit in the past few days.
I couldn’t help but think about Deadspin while watching Ford’s empty suits undermine Shelby and Miles’ efforts at every turn, constantly throwing hurdles at them and making their jobs excessively difficult. They hire Shelby to build them the fastest car, yet they consistently tell him to slow it down so that they can play corporate politics and advance their own careers. They constantly try to cut off Shelby at the knees, limiting his talent and bringing him down to their level. Somehow, despite everything, Shelby threads the needle perfectly. He’s able to do his job well while pleasing the cretinous suits just enough to keep them off his back, until he isn’t. At the end of the day, the suits always win. The big tired bureaucracy crushes the innovative spirited upstart. The system is undefeated.
Just Mercy
Just Mercy is another fairly standard studio Oscar bait film based on a true story, but damn is it effective. Destin Daniel Cretton’s new film tells the story of Bryan Stevenson, an ambitious young black attorney from Harvard who moves to Alabama to fight for the rights of falsely convicted inmates on death row. Stevenson has the facts and the law on his side, but the white male-dominated system thwarts him and his clients at every turn.
Stevenson eventually finds some success, but evident truths that would be simple to prove in a fair environment require tireless, herculean efforts in the town of Monroeville, Alabama, a city that prides itself on the progressive writings of Harper Lee but is actually rotten to its white racist core. The judicial system and law enforcement conspire to create an almost unbeatable bureaucracy that can only be overcome when the smartest lawyer that’s ever worked in the town is able to appeal cases high enough to escape its corrupt hateful bubble.
Regardless of the outcome, Stevenson’s clients lose. Even if their conviction is overturned and they escape the horrors of the electric chair, they’ve still lost decades of their lives rotting in a cell, ill-equipped to reenter society. Conversely, the system always wins. It methodically strips the rights and dignity from poor black citizens, just as it was designed to do. It’s impossible to beat the bureaucracy. You just have to limit your losses as much as you can.
Seeing these two movies in the span of six hours was exasperating. Neither film is great, but both do an incredible job of tapping into the rage and frustration experienced by individuals fighting against the misguided efforts of bloated, incompetent power structures. I need to watch a happy movie now.
Michael Dixon is covering the Austin Film Festival because he has a crippling movie addiction, and he’d like to share it with you. See the rest of his festival coverage at the links below.
Editor’s note: Movie addiction is highly contagious. Symptoms include watching 17 movies in a week while working a full-time job, blogging about those movies, and relentlessly guilting your friends into reading your dumb blog as they become progressively annoyed and gradually stop speaking to you. If you or a loved one is experiencing any of these symptoms, please consult a therapist immediately.
2019 Austin Film Festival Preview
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 1
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 2
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 3
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 4
Austin Film Festival 2019: Day 6
