Jack Brabham documentary offers little for Formula 1 fans or movie fans

Jack Brabham was undoubtedly an Australian champion, but if you expect this new movie about his life to offer fresh insight, think again.

A new documentary seeks to cast on light on Australian sports legend Jack Brabham’s considerable achievements and legacy.

But what it won’t do is deep dive into what made the three-time Formula 1 world champion tick or how he felt in the many decades between his retirement in 1970 and his death in 2014.

Brabham, for all of its good intentions in venerating an influential figure in motorsport, is an unsatisfying and shallow documentary that barely scratches at the surface of the man, let alone offer up fresh insight into who he was.

That failing lies in what Brabham filmmakers acknowledge in the movie’s short 84-minute runtime – that he had a certain Australian male stoicism which eschewed fuzzy, emotional stuff in favour of being tough.

One of the commentators tells us that he’s read every word written on Jack Brabham, and he still doesn’t know who he was.

Brabham isn’t going to change that – there are great limitations to making a documentary about someone who didn’t appear to share that part of themselves with other people over his 84 years.

Brabham is a shallow documentary that doesn’t offer any fresh insights

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You can’t flirt with Formula 1 without hearing the name Jack Brabham, the boy from Hurstville who became the first man in Formula 1 to win a world championship in a car bearing his name. It’s a feat that hasn’t been repeated.

His legacy is gargantuan and he is ranked among the greats such as Bruce McLaren, Juan Manuel Fangio, Graham Hill, Colin Chapmin, Ron Dennis, Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart — the latter three lent their faces and testimonials to Brabham.

Brabham has a classic three-act structure in which the first part is dedicated to telling the audience about his rise in the world of motorsport, from the moment he started racing midget cars to his early successes on the track after moving to the UK.

It’s fairly rote for a sports documentary and some of the footage and narration around the danger of F1 in the 1950s are among Brabham’s most effective parts.

It deftly depicts the enormous risks in that era of not just being a racer in all motorsports but also a spectator – there’s crazy archival footage of a car flying into a stand at Le Mans 1955, killing 83 people.

Jack Brabham was an Australian motorsport legend

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As Brabham moves through his career, the man at the centre of it remains elusive. The beats are perfunctory, as if it’s just listing achievements, rather than making the connection between the thrill and adrenaline of a sport and a soul that’s chasing something transcendent, something you can’t get driving 60km/hr down a suburban road.

It also doesn’t create any tension – for a film about a sport with top speeds of more than 350km/hr, Brabham is oddly flat.

When the documentary starts to bring in his family, including sons Geoff and David (both men would go on to have successful racing careers of their own) it begins to touch on something more personal.

(No mention of other son Gary and his multiple child sex assault convictions.)

Geoff and David both share anecdotes of a father who was absent, or distant when he wasn’t. But apart from one incident David briefly recounts, it all feels generalised and not specific, as if it could apply to any family including high-achieving sports stars.

Every time Brabham scratches at something resembling substance – such as his contemporaries who recalled the mercilessly competitive way he drove against them, forcing them off the track – the movie would pull back instead of diving in.

Perhaps there wasn’t much to dive into.

Brabham is a documentary that maybe shouldn’t have been made – not because he’s not a worthy subject but because the filmmakers, including director Akos Armont, obviously didn’t have access to the kind of material that would underpin a more substantial or effective movie.

The final act of Brabham feels like a marketing reel for a present day crowd-funding campaign for David Brabham’s racing team project

Brabham joins a genre with some stellar predecessors: the emotional poignancy of Senna, the mind-blowing detail of Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive and the pulse-racing urgency of 1: Life to the Limit, a documentary that stirs excitement and elevates the sport and those crazy enough to choose it.

Brabham doesn’t do any of those things. While a small-budget Australian documentary will always struggle to compete, it still needed to offer audiences something more than it did.

And that something more definitely wasn’t the final 20 minutes of the movie, which is essentially a generic marketing reel for David Brabham’s crowd-funding campaign to relaunch a race team.

Its awkward inclusion makes you question whether Brabham didn’t delve into the aspects of a sporting legend who, along with his considerable achievements, was perhaps, as the film hints, also a ruthlessly ambitious, cold man, in case it diminished contributions to the fundraiser.

Couple that with the fact that Brabham doesn’t give you any insight that you couldn’t have gleaned from Jack Brabham’s Wikipedia page, and it all feels like a bit of a soulless exercise.

Rating: 2/5

Brabham is available to stream on Stan now and for digital rental or purchase through iTunes and Google Play

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