Enzo Ferrari, the Mann and the Myth

Michael Mann’s excellent ‘Ferrari’ may not move as fast as the recent pack of car-racing movies, but it definitely finishes first. For a movie about cars, there is actually not a ton of racing. Mann stages a couple of test-track sequences and a very long race at the movie’s end, to suit the length of the actual race, the Mille Miglia, a brutal thousand-mile street run through Italy that was popular from the 1930s through the 1950s. The rest of the movie is car-business shenanigans and a deep dive into Enzo Ferrari’s complicated personal life; he essentially had two families. The movie covers 1957, the year in Ferrari’s life where everything came to a head.

FERRARI ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Michael Mann
Written by: Troy Kennedy Martin
Starring: Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley
Running time: 131 mins

Adam Driver, who is much younger, plays Ferrari as a man in his late 50s, vanishing into a passable Italian accent, slicked-back gray hair, and high-waisted pants with suspenders. His Ferrari is emotionally complex, passionate, difficult, and highly intelligent. You can see the gears turning in Driver’s, and Ferrari’s, head as he struggles with his disintegrating personal life, his shaky business dealings, and his single-minded desire to win the Millie Miglia with fast cars destined for destruction.

But while Driver is quite good, Penelope Cruz is even better as his wife and business partner Laura, a grieving mother and scorned wife who holds the Ferrari company together with some ruthless scheming. We rarely see Laura outside of the grim confines of the Ferrari apartment in Modena, where she glowers and stews while Ferrari sleeps with his other woman (and pats his son on the head at breakfast), in a secret countryside estate.

Mann stages the Ferrari marital conflict without a ton of melodrama, despite the melodramatic stakes, keeping the camera steady and allowing Troy Kennedy Martin’s intelligent screenplay to do the heavy lifting. The Michael Mann-ness of the movie comes to the fore in the close-quartered, visceral car scenes, which he intersperses with just enough music and the occasional wide shot of mountains or coastline to give this four-wheeled death dance some glamour.

And this is Italy in 1957 after all, so there are old hotels, paparazzi, heaping plates of pasta and cured meats, and endless pours of wine and Campari, not to mention second-tier starlets hanging around the edges of the racing scene. So despite the financial and personal troubles, the movie touches on enough wish-fulfillment nostalgia points to make it all seem glamorous and entertaining, which is the first duty of car-racing movies after all.

Compare Ferrari with this year’s Gran Turismo, which had its charms, but it was also a paint-by-numbers march-to-victory story where the stakes never really went beyond “win” or “don’t win.” Ford Vs. Ferrari, set in the same basic time period, and even featuring a few of the same supporting historical names, was an Oscar-nominated crowd pleaser, but it, too, never really deviated from the rousing Hollywood underdog template.

Ron Howard’s ‘Rush’ was full of thrilling race sequences, but the story was dull, and the F1 cars in that movie were spaceships compared with the kinds of prototypes Enzo throws out on the track in ‘Ferrari’. As for the best car-racing movie of the century, Adam McKay’s ‘Talledega Nights, the Ballad of Ricky Bobby,’ comparing that with Ferrari is like comparing Frankenstein with Young Frankenstein. It’s hard to take any car movie seriously after Talledega Nights, but Ferrari comes pretty close to commanding that attention.

If Ferrari has a flaw, it’s that Martin’s screenplay fails to give much depth to any character other than Enzo and Laura Ferrari. Shailene Woodley embodies a certain nobility as Ferrari’s other “wife,” Lina, but her role is pretty thin. And the rest of the characters are all basically nameless mechanics and business associates. The attempt to dramatize the life of the racer Alfonso de Portago, a Spanish playboy and aristocrat who worked his way onto Ferrari’s race team, falls flat, as there’s not really room for another drama on the edge of the Ferrari family saga, which makes de Portago’s fate at the movie’s end carry less emotional weight than it should.

But Mann depicts that fate, which I won’t reveal here, with skill and gruesome deftness. His camera doesn’t waver during the Mille Miglia, mirroring Ferrari’s resolve. He is one of our master directors, and ‘Ferrari’ is a welcome late addition to his body of work.