After a solid eight years in the oven – and God knows how long it was stewing in Michael Mann’s brain before he even approached Christian Bale about it back in 2015 – Ferrari has come as a Christmas gift for Mojito fiends and lovers of b- GREAT asses, whose presence on places like Letterboxd probably outnumbers the population of several island nations. Regardless of how Mann works, it should not have taken this long for someone to give him the resources to make this movie or for an actor’s schedule to work out long enough so that he could steer them to glory. It’s a bummer that expectations for this film will be inevitably informed by James Mangold’s Ford v. Ferrari, a perfectly good movie whose accessibility and charming nature stands in direct contrast to Mann’s work, because, as “entertainment,” there’s no question that Mangold’s interpretation of events a decade or so later would be spraying the celebratory champagne. That is a based-on-a-true story fable that only Hollywood could produce – with a little pluck and redneck ingenuity, one of the biggest car companies in the world could take down a specialty automaker at Le Mans! – and one can imagine the (deserved! It’s a great time!) U.S.A. chants that metaphorically spilled out of theaters back in 2019 if one can remember all that long ago. Mann’s take on that story (he originally was going to direct a variation on the same events) would have, as he has said in interviews, emphasized his belief that Ken Miles’ fatal crash was a suicide, and this is the lens one must view Ferrari through.
To say that 1957 was a bad year for Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), a man who, even at that time, was becoming synonymous with “gorgeous, high-quality automobiles” as well as “racing titan,” would be a drastic understatement. It wasn’t as bad as, say, 1956, in which Ferrari’s son Dino died following his battle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy – he went from working alongside his father in the family business to the grave in just six months – but ’57 is the first full year of his life without his son. His marriage is devolving into a bitter business partnership: His wife, Laura (a fantastic Penelope Cruz), oscillates between fits of depression and anger and is keenly aware of the fact that she owns half of Ferrari, lording it over him and forcing him to come to her to beg for money as a kind of humbling. He’s not without sin himself, but there are more pressing matters at hand than personal issues, or so he thinks. The company is slowly falling apart, thanks to Ferrari’s demanding precision. They can only produce so many of their cars for the aristocracy and nouveau riche at a time while their racing team becomes a money pit. This isn’t just due to the typical costs of R&D: It’s also payouts sent to their drivers’ widows since, even two years after the Le Mans disaster of ’55, motorsports are still incredibly deadly for those behind the wheel and for those watching from the stands. But it turns out that things can get worse, and they will, before they can get any better.
Ferrari was pushing sixty during the events that Mann dramatizes here, well into his sagging jowls and paunch period, and casting a forty-year-old like Driver seems, at first blush, like a misstep. Old-age makeup is far from its nadir a decade ago when it was a producer-enforced axiom dictated to casting departments in order to attract the public’s attention and/or funding (as much as I love Clint, J. Edgar was a particularly egregious example of this in practice), and Driver doesn’t look bad here – minimal make-up, some hair dye, a bit of padding under his suits – but he doesn’t look old. Knowing a little bit about racing doesn’t help, either: If you come knowing the context that the child he and Cruz are mourning throughout the course of the film was in his twenties when he passed away, you’ll probably wonder why Mann chose actors who, through no fault of their own, make an autumn-year existential crisis into something resembling middle-age dread. But beyond the House of Gucci accent, Driver brings something to the table that few actors of his generation can do as well as he: Brooding. Ferrari’s taciturn malaise and his struggle to keep everything rolling inside of him from boiling over, even as he’s surrounded by perpetual reminders of his son’s death (and his own), is the source of his emotional arc: He is fundamentally powerless in all aspects of his life, from the personal to the financial to the existential. His cars fail him, no matter how well-engineered they may be.
Notions of causality begin to creep in, Job-like in their perniciousness: What on Earth did I do to deserve this? Is this my fault? Survivor’s guilt rages inside of him as much as it does in Laura. Yet only one of them fully broke their vows, and on this count, he has no one to blame but himself for the assured collapse of his marriage and the potential destruction of the company that both he and his dead son worked so hard to preserve through the tumult of the war and reconstruction. His partner, Lina (Shailene Woodley, who tries out at least a dozen accents here and finds that none fit her), is an oasis to the tempest raging around his home, a locus fully under his control in a world bereft of it. They have a son together, as well, whose existence Ferrari has worked tirelessly to keep from Laura, and he regards the boy with a skeptical bemusement. He is his father’s son, no doubt, excited about the races, begging for autographs from rival drivers, but Enzo keeps him at a remove, fearing that any closeness to the boy will only add to the pain that he already feels – and he also doesn’t want to expose the child’s existence to Laura, given that she’ll tear everything apart and almost assuredly guarantee that he will never be a proper “heir.”
In short, he’s a Mann protagonist, estranged from the world even as he pushes it to its limits, rocked by fate and the psychic fallout of his contributions to creating it, desperately trying to hold on to the wheel even as he careens down the path laid for him. Driver is able to suggest this depth almost fully through his presence, a towering, awkward figure who seems at a remove: we rarely see him happy, outside of a meal with his drivers or in flashbacks to the immediate aftermath of the war, when he was falling in love with Lina and Dino was still alive. But there’s another figure in his life who stokes the smoldering embers of his son’s memory: Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), a minor Italian aristocrat, thrill-seeker, movie-star romancer, and well-qualified driver who joins the Ferrari team following the death of one of its members on the track.
In contrast to a lot of racing movies, none of the drivers are portrayed as particularly devil-may-care: For the oldest member of the team, Piero Taruffi (a great Patrick Dempsey, sporting a white head of hair), his main concern is whether or not his car will have an ashtray or not. They’re competent men, placed in fantastically dangerous circumstances well before the advent of roll cages or even seatbelts, who are physical manifestations of liability, be it their own or the manufacturer’s, one misstep away from being blamed for any number of tragedies, no matter if that blame is deserved. But even then, that sense of immortality possessed by the younger drivers still pervades, as they wonder why they even need to write “Just-In-Case” farewell letters to their loved ones on the night of the race. Taruffi, the consummate professional, has his already sealed by the time the others start, instead focusing on road maps and the terrain.
Befitting his status, Mann doesn’t fuck around with how he presents racing to us. We’re given the thrill, which is captured in such a breathtakingly cinematic way that it would make Neill Blomkamp green with envy. It’s often understated just how valuable Mann’s contributions to car cinema are, perhaps because a lot of them took place in his Miami Vice episodes, and the legacy of the “In the Air Tonight” sequence from that pilot carries over to this: Mann utilizes over-the-shoulder camera mounts to appropriately and accurately emphasize the speed of Ferrari’s cars, cutting only to capture the particulars of a turn from a remove or a close-up on a hand clutching the gearshift. It’s loud, visceral, and beautiful, the kind of driving that one imagines themselves doing when racing from all of the impossible angles, a dream of speed and motion. But with dreams come nightmares, and though it’s something of a fool’s errand to attempt to preserve the secrecy of one of the most well-publicized disasters in Italian motorsport history, I’ll do my best, given how essential it is to the resolution of Ferrari’s arcs. What I will say is that Mann captures the last-ever running of the Mille Miglia with unsparing brutality, one that almost borders on cruelty, with the rich score cutting out as he cuts to a slow-motion close-up of a tire bursting before documenting, in real-time, the red racer’s path through the air, and the carnage it leaves in its wake once it comes to a halt in a ditch, a trail of freshly severed limbs and crushed bodies paved through the pedestrians who came to watch. It is fucking devastating, to the point that even Ferrari’s stoic nature is breached.
Ferrari isn’t so much a picture about the technical process, as films about racing often are, as much as it is a portrait of a man being forced to confront the thing that he fears the most. He’s not afraid to die, that much is true: In perhaps the most outright Mann moment of the film, Driver delivers a frustrated speech to the team following a loss, in which he tells them that it’s better to crash trying to get ahead of a competitor than it is to hesitate, his aggression boiling over to the point that Driver’s accent nearly slips into a straight-up James Caan impression at its climax. The racer in him never disappeared once he stepped behind a desk. Rather, what Ferrari fears is loss, having already lost so much, of having his life’s work undone by his own failings in the pursuit of perfection. He shoulders the blame for an entire company, and his crown weighs him heavily. What relief he finds comes in the form of absolution in dire circumstances: That one thing wasn’t his fault after everything felt so painfully causal, which forces him to take a step back and survey his life. There are things he cannot control, which he will never be able to, but there are neglected aspects of his life that he can actively participate in, whose joys come through their experience rather than their result.
It’s a perspective well in line with Mann’s as a filmmaker – that through embracing chaos and its formal expression, much as he did with his shift to digital filmmaking in the ‘00s, there’s a chance for one to reach even greater highs with less-than-perfect means. Ferrari is a tribute to the messiness of perfection, in subject and in form, and it’s yet another Mann classic, even if it’ll have Ford fanboys seeing red.