Ferrari review: Michael Mann mythologizes motorsports and manhood
Adam Driver stars as a man driven by craftsmanship and ego to create success despite devastation
Film Reviews ferrari
With Ferrari, director Michael Mann pops the hood and takes a look at the engine powering one man’s journey towards icon status during a tumultuous time. Through this titular, fallible protagonist, the audacious auteur explores many of his favorite recurring themes about the male identity, ruminating on men’s specialized skillsets, strengths, and vulnerabilities—especially when it comes to relationships with women. He also adds a kinetic, combustible beauty within gripping action sequences that put us in the driver’s seat as we ogle that gloriously seductive signature racing red.
Once a preeminent race car driver, Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is having a tough go of it as an entrepreneur in 1957. It’s been 10 years since he opened a factory in the rubble of post-war Italy with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), and their business manufacturing personal and professional sports cars is on the verge of collapse. Their marriage is also in shambles due to the recent death of their terminally ill 24-year-old son Dino (who’s incidentally named after Enzo’s deceased brother and father). Plus Enzo’s been leading a secretive second life with mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their young son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese). His abrasive mother Adalgisa (Daniela Piperno) makes no secret about her judgment of him, cruelly uttering, “The wrong son died.”
Business manager Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati) advises Enzo that if he doesn’t find an investor soon, he’ll be bankrupt. A partnership with another company would allow him to carry on his obsession with creating the perfect race car while manufacturing hundreds of consumer cars. However, he must take control of Laura’s shares in the business, as well as win the Mille Miglia—a treacherous, high-pressure, multi-driver race through the Italian countryside—to attract the capital in the first place. And even if he can, he’s reticent to cede any power to another corporation. Plus he’s breaking in a new headstrong driver, Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone), and facing a battle with Laura, whose grief has turned corrosive.
Tooling around in the territory Mann and screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin map out is deeply fascinating. The adaption of Brock Yates’ novel “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine,” starts at a place of palpable loss that allows Enzo to experience a precision-calibrated ascension over the course of the picture. Strategic character construction reveals a dichotomous man chasing the myth of perfection in his professional career while his personal life is a sloppy mess of self-styled entanglements. The film takes a blessed reprieve from becoming a stereotypical hagiography, as the filmmakers spotlight their subject’s human frailty and foibles without romanticizing them, and also take a sharp left turn during the alarmingly visceral, gory climax that wraps up this package in a fittingly untidy bow.
There’s ample time to unpack our hero’s internal machinations, from the self-sabotaging of his company and personal life to the guilt and grief spawned by the deaths of his friends and family. Mann and company brilliantly dig into how this haunting sorrow affects his relationships with the living. Enzo puts up walls, often coldly treating interpersonal interactions like they’re engineering problems to be solved on one of his roaring beasts of the road, or looking at drivers as just another gear in the machine. And each of his relationships with the women in his life reflects a different struggle: With Lina he wrestles with his emotions. He battles with Laura about the business. And his conflict with his mother is focused on his ego. He tries to compartmentalize his anxieties and fears lest they all crash into one another.
Like Ferrari himself, the technical craftsmanship earns high marks. Erik Messerschmidt takes a painterly approach to capturing the three drastically different worlds Enzo inhabits. He tailors each for a nuanced mood—whether we’re in the soothing sanctuary of the Lardi home, between the walls of the dank and oppressive Ferrari chambers, or feeling the freedom of the airy race track. This all works in chorus with Maria Djurkovic’s perfect production design, with its distinct color palettes enhancing character texture, and Daniel Pemberton’s score, which is both symphonic and percussive, occasionally aided by compositions by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke.
Driver is terrific as Enzo, nailing the true-life figure’s tall stature and poised physicality, but also insightfully highlighting hidden facets in the character’s psyche. He’s a nimble performer in the choreographed dance between his pensive, internalized actions and Mann’s specialty of strong staging. Both performance and camera placement evoke an emotional response. Cruz turns in commanding work, practically stealing the film away from its lead. Though she’s played a happy-turned-disgruntled wife before, she fills in the lines of this cantankerous character with unique colors and shading. Woodley, a capable actress who’s miscast, is overshadowed, showing little compelling presence outside of narrative function.
The movie is often darkly funny as the characters lob barbs at each other. Nevertheless, the story feels a tad truncated in spots. An elongated run time would service the action and narrative a bit better—and, as Mann fans know, he does love releasing a good director’s cut. It’s also not quite the ensemble piece audiences might expect from him with its solid roster of supporting actors (for example, Patrick Dempsey as Ferrari’s racing driver Piero Taruffi is surprisingly underserviced). However, when it comes to its thematic pull, Ferrari belongs in the same showroom as the rest of Mann’s filmography.
Ferrari opens in theaters on December 25
44 Comments
Ferrucio better be in this.
Why? Can no story be told of Ferrari without him?
Wrong year…Lamborghini’s issues with Ferrari came some years later.
Given that this is second time Driver has played a famous Italian, it feels like maybe House of Gucci walked so that Ferrari could run.
Next up: Galileo!
They don’t even need to write a script! Just use Brecht’s play.
Driver is… Machiveli!
He should go for Mario
Next up….Cake Boss, a gritty take on Buddy Valastro’s origin story.
“The wrong son died.”Can you legally use this line in a movie after Walk Hard?
Enzo Ferrari has to think about his whole life before a race.
Enzo Ferrari never once paid for drugs. Not once.
Unfortunately it’s a real thing. Imagine if Hunter had died and Beau lived. Things would look rosier for next fall.
I suppose strangers saying stuff like this is part of why he did all that crack.
What a load of shit. Hunter Biden nonsense doesn’t move the needle. Only Kool Aid drinking cultists give two fucks. If it was an issue, it would have been a bigger one in 2020
But H(unt)er(‘s) Emails!
It’s weird that Trumpers want to go after him when so many say that Trump used cocaine himself. Another case of “When a narcissist accuses he is actually confessing.”
No. I cannot take such line seriously without yelling WRONG KID DIED! He wasn’t half his son, not even a quarter the man after the accident.
SPEAK ENGLISH, DOC! WE AIN’T SCIENTISTS!
I mean, it’s kind of a beloved go-to for abusive parents and probably has been for thousands of years
This brings to mind American author John Gardner. As a boy he was made to help on the family farm. He was driving a tractor pulling a disc one day. His younger brother was foolishly riding the disc. He fell and the machinery ran over him. Every year on his birthday Mother Gardner made a cake for her deceased son’s birthday and said the same thing to young John. What an inspiration for Grendel (the novel). Reminds me of my own Mater.
Please tell me at least one person on set tried to tell Mann that “The wrong son died” is famously a running gag in a spoof of schmaltzy biopics.
Its basically Walk Hard plagerism at this point.
Isn’t that what Elvis’ mom said?
Comparisons with Ford v Ferrari were inevitable given the title, let alone subject matter, and despite having approximately zero interest in auto racing I found FvF much more enjoyable and engaging because it did a better job putting you in the cars with the drivers… you know, the ones who actually were putting everything on the line. With the latter film I never felt like more than a spectator. To me, Enzo, despite one or two scenes of grief, came across as a manipulator and user without much compassion and although there’s nothing wrong with making a film about such a person, it means a little more effort is required. This is a film by and for people who already care deeply about Ferraris.Great performances though, particularly Cruz. Driver is always reliable, although I spent much of the film wondering if they couldn’t have found ann actor the right age rather than burying him under makeup and prosthetics. (There were a couple of brief flashbacks which seem to have been included only to remind us of what Driver actually looks like.) Leone is incredibly charismatic. Dempsey is a racing nut and probably would’ve taken any role he was offered in this movie, and Taruffi happened to be the one he was best suited for.
“Woodley, a capable actress who’s miscast, is overshadowed, showing little compelling presence outside of narrative function.”IS she a capable actress? I’ve never seen her in anything where she didn’t have that same vacant look she had in “Secret Life of the American Teenager”
I was initially thinking, “Yeah, maybe at first, but didn’t she do… something that…”Turns out I was thinking of Hailee Steinfeld.
The Fault In Our Stars? Which I could barely look at because it has Ansel Elgort and he’s obnoxious af, imo. The Divergent series. All wishful, Young Adult stuff that oozes hormones and romantic fatalism. I don’t know if she’s any good because what makes an actor good? Good story, script, directing, camera work, blocking, lighting, expert cutting, production values, score. Or she just doesn’t have that ‘thing’ that I can’t define. Looking at the trailer I’m not very impressed.
Dollar General Kristen Stewart.
i’d say she clears the low bar of ‘capable’, but it’s one of those things where like…yeah 10 years ago she showed promise so we’re just kind of stuck with her.
You misspelled Jesse Plemons
She was marginally better in Big Little Lies, but nobody was v good in the crappy second season. Honestly, she and Theo James should have been banned from acting for life after Divergent. It’s really a puzzle how she got cast in this., maybe Michael Mann really does or really doesn’t like Aaron Rodgers.
“Driver is terrific as Enzo”Then why in the trailer does he sound like he’s playing Dracula in a Mel Brooks spoof?
I’m in.
I don’t know why they can’t just cast Italian actors in these roles.
Or, if they must cast an American, tell him not to bother with an accent at all.
Both “Enemy at the gates” and “The death of Stalin” proved faux accents aren’t necessary, so just cut them out.It’s not like the Italian release won’t be dubbed anyway.
Italo-Americans are American too, I guess. Aren’t there enough to play such roles?Bugged me at trailers for Gucci as well, why are they going back to the fifties, when white folks played Asians and everyone else with horrible mocking accents? And all wokeness and racist implications aside, such stuff is just horrible to watch and listen too.
Al Pacino was busy?
Just dusting off that awful Gucci accent.
“It’s-ah me, Enzo!”
Looks very slick. Merchant and Ivory would be impressed. Famous inventor creates marvelous machine, fools around with other women. Thank you again, 2023. Pleased to see that no one insisted Driver Bradley-ize Ferrari; they don’t resemble each other at all. But, yikes, that accent isn’t any better than Gucci. Looking at photos of Enzo I’m wondering if he started the wearing-dark-glasses-inside trend.
Act like a Mann!
The director/developers fail to take into consideration the cultural disconnect between other less indoctrinated ethnic groups. that is to say that while some groups are well familiar with the cultural chrematistics, of mafioso post war world war two Italian life , there are many who cannot identify and struggle to interpret the movie.