Film review: Williams

★★★★☆
The title of Morgan Matthews’s insightful film doesn’t just refer to Frank Williams, the boss of the Williams Formula One team. This film transcends the remit of the sports documentary by also focusing on his late wife Virginia, who wrote a book — A Different Kind of Life — about her experiences that is quoted throughout, and on his daughter Claire, who is deputy principal of the team and therefore the most powerful woman in Formula One. Frank Williams’s story alone is compelling: the rise from selling spare parts to becoming the head of one of the top teams in the sport; the accident that left him a quadriplegic; the deaths of his drivers Piers Courage and Ayrton Senna. Yet giving so much time to his equally remarkable wife and daughter elevates the film to a family saga. It highlights his stoicism, but also his selfishness — his daughter refers to 32 family holidays, none of which he had been on — and confirms Formula One as a hotbed of sexism.
15, 109 min