Order and chaos vie for pole position in Ferrari, Michael Mann’s vigorous biopic about the famed Italian automaker. Painting a multifaceted portrait of the racing legend during a particular moment of personal and professional crisis, the auteur’s first feature since 2015’s Blackhat hums with steely passion and pain. A tale of irreconcilable conflicts and contradictions, it may briefly fall victim to the same sorts of schisms that plague its protagonist, yet thanks to Mann’s sleek stewardship and intense performances from Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz, this adaptation of Brock Yates’ 1991 Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine proves a complex character study of a pioneer torn between his warring instincts.
The closing-night selection of this year’s New York Film Festival (and premiering in theaters on Dec. 25), Ferrari establishes its tone from the outset with a newsreel-esque prologue in which a young Enzo Ferrari (Driver) wins an auto race and, then, with a scene in 1957—10 years after Ferrari began producing cars—in which Enzo drives away from his home, his hands and feet working his vehicle’s pedal and gearshift with preternatural skill and confidence. In designer suits and his trademark matching sunglasses, his silver hair slicked back for maximum aerodynamism, Enzo is a man of imposing self-possession. Nonetheless, this initial glimpse is of the tycoon departing the house he covertly shares with his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), whom he met and fell in love with during WWII, and their young son Piero—an early indication that his circumstances are (and the road ahead will be) far from smooth.
Enzo knows how to build a car but his life is a much less carefully constructed affair, and that becomes clear when he returns to his primary residence to discover his spouse Laura (Cruz) waiting for him with a pistol in hand. Laura’s fury over Enzo’s infidelity is one of many proverbial guns to his head throughout Ferrari, and that’s even before Laura discovers the existence of Lina and Piero, the latter of whom is a uniquely distressing revelation given that Enzo and Laura are still mourning the untimely demise of their only son, Alfredo. Nonetheless, as embodied by Driver, the automaker has the pedal perpetually to the metal, blazing forward with the brash sureness of someone who not only recognizes his reputation as a “national treasure” but believes it—and thus thinks that he can handle any problem, be it mechanical, familial or emotional.
Ferrari begins with Enzo in the midst of calamity: Laura is firing bullets near his head; his mother (Agnese Brighittini) wishes that he, instead of his brother, had died in WWII; his company (which he co-owns with Laura, who handles its books) is on the verge of bankruptcy; and rival Maserati is threatening to break one of Ferrari’s speed records. Upon hearing that they’ve been surpassed, Enzo tells his colleagues that they’re to reclaim their title “now” and heads to the racetrack, where his driver Eugenio Castellotti (Marino Franchitti) promptly perishes in a horrifying crash. In the sequence immediately preceding this fatality, a priest equates Enzo and his ilk to “gods” (and, in fact, to Jesus himself). If he carries himself like a deity, however, Enzo is repeatedly reminded that he’s not omnipotent by the numerous deaths over which he feels tremendous guilt, be it Alfredo, Eugenio, or two friends who died behind the wheel of Ferraris years earlier, compelling Enzo to leave driving behind.
As if this weren’t enough on Enzo’s plate, the media likens him to Saturn devouring his son, and his relationship with Lina is strained by the question of whether Piero will be permitted to assume the Ferrari name—a tricky predicament considering that Laura doesn’t know about him. “How do we reconcile this?” asks Enzo. The answer is that they can’t, at least easily, especially once Laura learns about her husband’s secret life and is predictably crushed. Ferrari offers its main character no absolution on this front, foregrounding Laura’s agony in close-ups—one in Alfredo’s tomb, the other at Lina’s front door—in which Cruz masterfully expresses a cascading wave of longing, bitterness, rage, and sorrow. It’s as nuanced and moving a performance as the Oscar-winner has given since 2006’s Volver, and it turns her sparring sessions with Driver into the film’s highlights.
Just as Enzo is rife with incongruities, so too is Ferrari riven in its second half, when Mann fixates on the Mille Miglia race and the Ferrari team—including newcomer Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone) and vets Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey) and Peter Collins (Jack O'Connell)—tasked with saving the company by coming in first, since a victory will allow Enzo to sell enough cars to stay solvent and to solidify a long-term financing partnership with a foreign automaker.
Mann’s racing sequences are propulsive and muscular if somewhat superfluous; the film’s center is Enzo, and when it turns away from him for stretches, its momentum flags. Fortunately, those spells are relatively short-lived, and the director’s gorgeous widescreen artistry—facilitated by regular David Fincher cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, and typified by recurring downward-looking close-ups of Enzo—is transfixing. Eschewing the grainy DV visuals of his recent output, they corroborate Enzo’s opinion that, “When a thing works better, it is usually more beautiful to the eye.”
Ferrari boasts plentiful dramatic stakes but cares little for resolving them; rather, it attunes itself to Enzo in all his clashing, crashing glory. It’s a subtly bold and invigorating approach to the generally staid biopic genre, with Driver’s magnate barreling ahead through one literal and figurative wreck after another, always certain that he can repair that which is (or he’s) broken. Far from merely a one-note controlling striver, however, Enzo also exhibits frequent touches of brusque humor as well as a deeply rooted sense of responsibility and culpability for the loss of life wrought by his ultra-competitive ambition. In Mann and Driver’s expert hands, Enzo resonates as a titan whose thorny complications are the source of his successes and his failures, and for whom détente—with his loved ones, and himself—is impossible.
Another of his many films about rigorous, no-nonsense men who stand astride disparate worlds and are propelled by personal codes, Ferrari understands and embraces the meticulousness and messiness of its subject. Refusing to resort to a comforting formula, it demonstrates Enzo’s belief that triumph is never earned by playing it safe.
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