Veritable Tantrum

It’s not at all controversial to say Brad Pitt’s best films are the ones that rely heavily on his intoxicating charm. Being a great movie star requires knowing which deliriant to unleash on the audience for maximum impact, and Pitt’s remains his bottomless trove of flammable charisma.

Watching him commandingly yet smoothly scold a table of Oakland A’s scouts in Moneyball, or calmly de-escalate a surprise visit from a spurned-paramour-turned-Interpol-agent in Ocean’s Twelve, is maybe the only truly valid exercise in suspended disbelief. Yes, he’s fucking hot as shit, but he deploys micro-expressions perfectly in concert with his beauty. Those small touches make up the enormous gulf between a Brad Pitt and, say, a Taylor Kitsch, or any other blankly handsome leading man with a fleeting legacy.

Pitt brings that same, time-tested essence to Sonny Hayes in F1, whose racing sequences are so electrifying you can’t tell if it’s due to the assured direction Joseph Kosinski returns to the Bruckheimer formula or the charisma Pitt supercharges his supporting cast with. Playing Hayes’ long-time friend and owner of the flailing APXGP Formula 1 team, Javier Bardem manifests a warm chumminess that washes into the ocean any memory of him executing an innocent Texan with a cattle gun. Kerry Condon, a long-time favorite of this Irish reviewer who deftly flits between gearhead brilliance and eyelash batting as the race team’s technical director, finally showcases the commercially savvy side of her acting toolbox for the first time. There’s so much blockbuster perfection on display here, wholly supporting the timeless truth that transcendence can come just as much from formula (sorry) done well as from arthouse innovation.

F1‘s blockbuster blustery coalesces into another truth that in no way deals with transcendence: product placement will soon be the only way to get a major film like this made. Brand shots permeate every major sequence of F1, from Expensify to Mercedes to Geico to dozens more. The brand ubiquity aids the film’s verisimilitude — the crew shot at the British Grand Prix, Spa, and several other races this neophyte can’t even begin to feign knowledge of — but it can’t help but feel like Corporate America: The Movie. The world’s largest technology company with a $3 trillion market cap bankrolling the film doesn’t help either, ultimately giving the transcendently cinematic set pieces a slightly sour aftertaste.

Thus is Hollywood’s future when studio money remains far more difficult to unlock than brand money. Nate Bargatze’s upcoming The Breadwinner reportedly inked nearly a dozen product deals to achieve the desired production budget, an alluring workaround for a family-friendly comedy in a marketplace that’s all but dried up. Happy Madison boasts a long, shameless history of product placement in their movies, but that target on Adam Sandler’s back is ant-sized compared to his company’s galactic box-office receipts.

In that sense, F1 is an outlier for Apple Studios. It’s by far their highest-grossing theatrical release, and critics mostly enjoyed Pitt’s easy charms and Kosinski’s craftsmanlike thrills. What such a corporate-laden enterprise indicates for the future of moviemaking is undoubtedly gross, but cinemagoers will need to make concessions for certain, dare I say, products as this trend marches onward. When a fun, exhilarating version of it arrives on the big screen, you just have to be happy it wasn’t the worst version of it.