In Ferrari, the life-and-death stakes of professional car racing are made pretty clear early on. The smallest things – both and in and out of the driver’s control – can cause unconscionable horror. This is the tension in where Michael Mann loves to reside, watching his protagonists make consequential decisions as if they have any say against the laws of nature. The men that Mann creates are monsters of control, but the tragedy of their lives is that there are limits to that control that they cannot fathom. His characters have a reputation for toughness, for unmatched skill and wisdom in their position, and for refusing to show their vulnerabilities to their fellow characters. The brilliance of Mann is the way he reveals those vulnerabilities to the audience, demystifying the gods of his own creation. In this way, Ferrari is the ultimate thesis statement on Mann’s incredible career.
The film is less of a biopic than you might think. The script (written by Troy Kennedy Martin) never leaves 1957, a year filled with turmoil for Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver). He runs the car company with his wife, Laura (a great Penelope Cruz), a partnership that is teetering both personally and professionally. Enzo’s sole focus is on winning races – in particular, that year’s Mille Miglia – but the operations are funded on commercial car sales, in which Ferrari lags far behind the likes of Ford and Maserati. Enzo and Laura’s tempestuous marriage is crumbling in the face of grief and infidelity. Their son Dino died the previous year at 24 due to muscular dystrophy, while Enzo’s affair with Lina (Shailene Woodley) has produced a son who is known to everyone except Laura. In order to save the company, a merger may be necessary, but as bonds of trust between Enzo and Laura fall, their company appears bound for insolvency.
The reality is that all of this is secondary to Enzo, whose main obsession never strays away from the race track. At home, at the office, and even at church, Enzo’s only focus is on winning races, breaking records, and keeping records that they already have. He’s assembled a team of three racers: the poised Englishman Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), the white-haired, Italian veteran Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey), and a Spanish newcomer desperate to break into the game, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone). The three men face Enzo’s constant browbeating. A former racer himself, Enzo retired decades earlier after the tragic death of two of his friends, but his absence behind the wheel only serves to make him more tyrannical over their performance. He stresses over and over again to his racers: making the decision that can risk your life is the difference between winning and losing.
This theory, that high speed racing is just a long-form game of chicken between racers, goes a long way toward explaining Enzo’s view on life: there is no time for anything that is not in the pursuit of victory. Ferrari is at times a shockingly violent film, and Mann makes pains to show that mistakes can lead not only to death but utter carnage. The race sequences pulse with intensity, heightened by Mann’s intimately close camera, which feels like it’s inches away from an actor’s face. This has been a trademark of Mann’s films ever since digital cinematography gave him the opportunity to do so, a garish and polarizing visual aesthetic that has come to define his films since 2004’s Collateral. I’ve always appreciated the visceral edge this has given his twenty-first century work, but only in Ferrari has it served a true narrative purpose, which only adds to the film’s visual potency.
Death appears to be following Enzo at every turn, whether it be the specter of Dino or the high risk at which he places his racers. To the outside world he seems shockingly uncaring, calloused by the mortality rate of the racing profession. But in classic Mann fashion, this Great Man of History is actually haunted by ghosts who surround him at every waking moment. By clipping this story to such a short amount of time, screenwriter Martin paints a wide canvas using specificity, and Mann takes the specificity and further crafts a portrait of a man unwilling to accept his inability to prevent catastrophe. There’s not much difference between Enzo Farrari and Heat‘s Neil McCauley or The Insider‘s Jeffrey Wigand, and while the Ferrari story allows Mann to showcase the gorgeous vistas of the Italian locale, this is a story that Mann could tell in any place in the world.
The cast includes many non-Italians, which means the audience must contend with attempts at accent work that are a mixed bag, including Woodley and Dempsey, who seem to be employing a less-is-more strategy. Our two leads, Driver and Cruz, acquit themselves well, even if a moment of adjustment is needed. Driver’s Ferrari is another in the actor’s catalog of grimly sardonic heroes, aided by Driver’s imposing figure and singular delivery. Cruz is the film’s best performance. Her Laura is so much a “real brains of the operation” wife figure that it’s almost a cliché, but Cruz takes the heartbroken, embittered Laura and actually makes her something close to the real hero of the film. We know by the very casting of Cruz that there will be more to Laura than initially meets the eye, but Cruz is able to deliver this turn brilliantly, giving the film’s best flashes of drama and emotional impact.
Ferrari may not reach the level of Mann’s masterpieces from the 90’s and 00’s, but what it says about the legendary filmmaker at this point in his career is poignant. Mann doesn’t have the far reaching reputation of some of his peers, and his career will always be more defined by style than by substance. The consistency of theme throughout his filmography may seem repetitive to some, as if he’s been trying to write the same novel over and over again. There is an obsession with perfection, and like Ferrari himself, he’s not above encountering danger in order to achieve it (RIP to several horses on the set of HBO’s Luck). Mann’s preoccupation with the glories and failures of masculinity is more nuanced than what’s on the surface, but the brilliance of Mann is that that surface is so stunning that it can be difficult for some to see below it. If you do, you unlock one of the greatest directors of his time.
Directed by Michael Mann