When avant-garde jazzman Eric Dolphy penned a rhythmically fractured tribute to pianist Thelonious Monk for his 1964 disc Out to Lunch!, he gave the tune a title that instantly brought Monk to the mind’s eye: Hat and Beard. Monk usually sported a pointed goatee, and though he could be counted on to wear a hat, there was no predicting what sort of hat it would be. In his less outlandish moods, Monk would sit at the keyboard in a stingy-brimmed fedora, a beret, or an Irish tweed walking hat. More colorfully, he would sometimes wear a Persian lamb Cossack hat or a silk Mandarin skullcap.
Saxophonist Lester Young was also known for his hats — perhaps even more so than Monk, since Young could be counted on to wear, on all occasions, his signature style: a black fedora, the crown of which he folded flat. Indeed, the saxophonist’s hat was so well known that when jazz bassist Charles Mingus wrote a song in memory of Young, he called it Goodbye Porkpie Hat.
Given how the hat can make the man, what are we to make of the black cowboy hat worn by Matt Damon in Ford v Ferrari, in which he plays the race car driver and designer Carroll Shelby? I find it to be a clumsy bit of costuming that mars an otherwise fine film. The problem is the hat looks like it’s just come from the haberdashers. The crown has been freshly blocked and the brim carefully curled on either side. It’s not the way Shelby wore his hat in his prime. The real Shelby’s style wasn’t just iconoclastic; it was contemptuous of convention. His hat was a crumpled mess, its brim rolled and smushed to a point in the front, as if Robin Hood had tried to make a “bycocket” out of a battered old Stetson. Instead of a ribbon or lanyard, Shelby’s hatband was a strip of Indian beadwork.
And the hat was only half of it. Also missing from Ford v Ferrari is Shelby’s habit, learned on a Texas chicken farm, of wearing threadbare Carhartt bib overalls. He may have been the only man to have regularly driven Ferraris and Aston Martins in farmer duds.
Which brings us, in an admittedly roundabout manner, to the topic at hand, which is whether true stories are better witnessed through original photos and film or through a Hollywood re-creation, whether events are better told by those who were there or by actors speaking words written for them by the screenplay johnnies. Call it Documentary v. Dramatization.
I only know of Shelby’s penchant for racing in overalls because it was discussed in the excellent documentary The 24 Hour War (2016), which also covered the Ford/Ferrari feud. (If you’re not a gearhead, there’s another current competition between the doc and the drama: Last year saw Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the delightful documentary about children’s television personality Fred Rogers; this year, Tom Hanks dons cardigan and sneakers in the bio-pic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.)
Documentaries are not necessarily more accurate than dramatizations in recounting events. But what about the film footage itself? The 24 Hour War had the advantage of being about one of the most extensively filmed events in the world — the Le Mans car race. The carnage and crashes captured by professional and amateur cameramen alike are particularly mortifying because the death and mutilation are real. On the other hand, Ford v Ferrari takes us persuasively into the cockpits with the drivers, creating the sensation of being in a WWII aerial dogfight.
The competition between docs and dramas can be an entirely healthy one. The 24 Hour War set such a high standard that Ford v Ferrari had to fire on all cylinders to justify itself. If only they had gotten the hat right.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
