The used-car lot in Flywheel: Ignition of the Soul gives its protagonist an unusually clear reason to confuse skill with virtue. Noah Silva knows how to read a customer. He can recognize which story about a car will close the sale, and he has spent enough time hearing people thank him to treat that gratitude as evidence that the transaction was fair. The film’s strongest idea is to make his talent something he can keep when he changes. A man who wants to become more honest still needs to sell cars, and an honest sale still asks him to know how another person thinks.
Alessandro Barros relocates the material of the Kendricks’ 2003 Flywheel to Rio de Janeiro and puts Mário Bregieira at the center. The relocation gives the trade and the household a texture of their own. Money moving through a lot has a daily consequence for the people who work there. A change in Noah’s conduct can register at home before he has any fluent way to describe a change in his beliefs. Bregieira’s opportunity is in the difference between the confidence that gets Noah through an encounter with a stranger and the standing he has with a family that knows how he gets through those encounters.
There is an advantage to building the picture around a trade with an established reputation for hard selling. Noah cannot simply resolve to speak in a different tone and expect the next customer to accept him as a new person. The red Mustang in the publicity is an apt emblem of the way a seller can invite someone to imagine possessing a more interesting life. To make an honest version of the same pitch, he needs a distinction between enthusiasm and the withholding of information. That may sound like a small thing on which to hang a moral drama. The film gets more traction out of it than it does out of some much larger declarations.
The movie understands that doing business honestly requires more than privately feeling sorry. An old sale remains an old sale after somebody has prayed. The structure can give Noah’s new conviction material consequences whenever the next decision threatens his sense of himself as a provider. There is an appealing plainness to that idea. A car has a price and a condition, and two people can leave the same transaction with considerably different understandings of both. Noah’s profession offers a sharper test of his intentions than a succession of scenes about how certain he feels.
The family story has a more difficult time. A wife and child can understand the emotional cost of Noah’s habits long before he does, and a man learning to listen at home is a promising subject. The script keeps its attention mainly on what their reactions reveal about him. Their own reasons to be angry, patient or doubtful could have put more pressure on the turnaround. If a relationship has been altered by years of evasion, the person making amends can decide to begin the work. The timetable for trusting him belongs partly to someone else.
A confrontation at the family table makes the difficulty especially plain. Noah’s angry physical certainty has the same shape as his confidence in the salesroom, only here he can watch it fail. The scene offers Pérola Faria the opportunity to show what it costs to keep listening to somebody who has a familiar way of raising the stakes. It also points toward a harder story about how authority survives inside a family after the person who exercised it has come to regret his methods. The reconciliation would carry more force if it left space for the anger to change the conditions on which he can come back.
The remake’s instructional clarity will make sense to audiences coming for a drama about putting Christian conviction into practice. The strongest passages are those where the film gives that conviction an object or a bill or a person to answer to. There is less tension once a scene has already declared the correct choice and left the characters to illustrate it. The everyday business of the lot is rich enough to take some of that weight. A returning customer can ask a more difficult question than an uplifting speech.
