American filmmaker Michael Mann returns to the big screen for Ferrari, a long-held passion project for the legendary director. As one would expect from the director of Heat and Miami Vice, this biopic is a well-mounted and handsomely shot study of men obsessed by their work, but never fully hits top gear.
Based on Brock Yates’ biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine, Mann’s picture follows Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) in 1957, a particularly challenging year for the eponymous Italian car manufacturer, whose personal and financial problems reached their peak with a horrifying race crash involving one of his cars.
In the starring role, Driver feels strangely miscast. On paper, the tall, imposing Driver should be the perfect fit for the industrial titan Ferarri; the actor is a fine performer with a string of varied and strong performances to his name. Yet here he never seems to fully relax, acted off the screen by a far livelier Penélope Cruz playing his wife Laura, while he visibly labours through something approaching an Italian accent.
One wonders if the real ‘Ferrari’ of the film is indeed Cruz. Indeed, family legacy and its meaning – Enzo asserts more than once that while other manufacturers race their cars so that they can sell their brand to the public, the Ferrari name is known for the opposite – is perhaps the central theme of the film. In a later scene, Laura asks that Enzo’s illegitimate son, conceived with his not-so-secret girlfriend Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley in a thankless role), never bear the family name while she still lives.
Nevertheless, it’s never fully clear just what the film’s central thesis is. Many of Mann’s preoccupations are certainly present: a male protagonist obsessed with his work, women cast aside by those obsessions, kinetic, purposefully mounted action cinematography. And the film’s climactic set piece, an immaculately edited depiction of the gruelling Mille Miglia race that those who know their racing history will know did not end well, is as thrilling as it is shocking. Mann’s skill is on full display during this sequence; while the editing ratchets up the tension, the narrative arc of the race gives us the clearest insight into Ferrari’s own recklessness with others’ lives in pursuit of greatness. In fact, as a short film within a film, the race itself is a triumph.
For all Mann’s evident skill as a director and his clear passion for this story, there is a strange inertia at play with Ferrari, as if we are being shown a series of events that happened in Enzo’s life that year as opposed to being told a story. There is much to enjoy here, and much reaching for depth, particularly with the scenes that deal with the death of the Ferraris’ son, yet that depth is too often only glimpsed before slipping around the next bend in the road.
Christopher Machell