Bio-dramas – so vulnerable to cliche when they celebrate sporting heroes – are hard to get right even when they’re not competing with a definitive documentary on the subject. Senna, Netflix’s drama about the life and premature death of Brazilian motor racing superstar Ayrton Senna, arrives in the shadow of Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary feature of the same name, so it starts with a disadvantage. It has, however, six hour-long episodes to play with. What deeper new angles can it find?
Unfortunately, the answer is: none. This is a straightforward eulogising of the great sportsman that makes him seem more straightforward a character than he actually was, and relegates everyone in his life to a flat cartoon. The race sequences are thrilling and the narrative is too naturally exciting for the series to be boring, but whenever the roar of the engines stops, the dramatic momentum dies.
The show’s quest to follow every trope of motor racing dramas starts in the only way possible: as a child in São Paolo, Ayrton Senna da Silva – “Beco” to his loved ones – is given a go-kart by his car-mad dad. He has taken the hint dropped by his child who travels everywhere by running at full pelt, turning an imaginary steering wheel and saying “brrrrrrm!”. Within minutes of screen time, Ayrton is world karting champion and is leaving home for the UK, where the lower ranks of world motor racing – Formula Ford and Formula 3 – beckon.
Supporting characters in Senna have a particularly hard time if they’re British or female and, as the young-adult Ayrton tears up the English racing scene, the Brits around him are unintentionally hilarious. A series of crusty poshos, played by actors lumbered with sludgy expositional dialogue, plummily tell him he can’t do it, when we know he can. “That bloody idiot’s going over 100 miles per hour on a track he doesn’t know!” says a guy in a wax jacket. “He’s pushing too hard! For Christ’s sake!” shouts a different toff in a trenchcoat. But Ayrton is not to be dissuaded. “I know I can be a champion!” he cries, when someone questions whether he can be a champion. “I am a racing driver!” he insists, when his family back home suggest he stop being so silly and work in his father’s factory instead.
Ayrton wants only one thing, which is to drive cars around a track faster than anyone else. What’s driving him? Here is where Senna the drama might get one up on Senna the documentary, since Kapadia’s film deliberately painted the man as a mythical force of nature, the storied ideal of a pure competitor whose other characteristics were unexamined.
The drama pretty much sticks with that, despite endless scenes where a more interesting protagonist might emerge. In the title role, Gabriel Leone as Senna is bright, boyish and handsome – he is charm itself, unless someone puts him in an inferior car or bends the rules to cheat him out of a victory, which happens throughout his career and even more so when he breaks into Formula One. Even then, he is a simple righter of obvious wrongs, causing clashes that tend to resolve themselves immediately when Ayrton wins the next race. What makes him so single-minded is never explored: at one point he talks of an “emptiness” that sporting success fills, but we haven’t been given an idea of where in his soul that void is, or what created it. Even in the fateful final episode, when his pleas for better safety regulations go tragically unheeded and Ayrton himself dies in a crash, he is still more or less the same guy, as uncomplicated in his love of racing as he was as a boy on a go-kart. The real Senna’s Catholicism, philanthropy and national pride are barely touched on.
The place to apply some light and shade to the portrait would traditionally be via the women in the main man’s life, but there’s no progress there either. Whether it’s his childhood sweetheart or Brazil’s most famous children’s TV presenter, partners blandly come and go, eager for endless sex with their man but, in the long run, intolerant of his commitment to driving, which makes them come across as nagging dullards.
All of this nearly doesn’t matter, since the track sequences are spot on: we feel the speed, thanks to nimble editing between closeups of Leone’s knitted brow, pedals being pushed and, crucially, shots of real cars being driven on a real track, which bear the fruits of a decent production budget. In the later episodes, archive footage of the battles between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost are artfully mixed in.
For motor racing fans, Senna is a quick enough ride. But the man himself is still elusive.
• Senna is on Netflix now.
