Filmmaker Michael Mann is fascinated by the destructive masculinity within his determined protagonists. Whether they’re a professional safecracker, a police detective or black-hat hacker, he mythologizes them. Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), the focus of Mann’s latest film, Ferrari, is perhaps the supreme example as a self-made man, one who became an accomplished race car driver in his twenties and later established his own racing team and automobile manufacturing company. People called him “Il Commendatore,” translating to “The Commander,” and his legacy of sports cars continues to rake in billions of dollars to this day.
Mann, who investigates Enzo with a meticulous eye, covers a few months in 1957 where the entrepreneur’s professional and personal lives threaten to come crashing down. His business is on the verge of bankruptcy, with sales plummeting as his cars falter on the racetrack, prompting his advisers to tell him to make a deal with a larger company like Ford. And just the year prior, Enzo and his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) lost their 24-year-old son, Dino, to Duchenne muscular dystrophy, creating a rift in their marriage. He has a second family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their young son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), but hasn’t recognized them publicly. Despite this, Enzo does the only thing he knows–he puts his head down in his work and presses forward, vying to win the Mille Miglia, an open-road, roughly 1000-mile race across Italy, to attract business partners and rescue the company.
Racing is religion for Enzo. In an early scene, a priest gives a sermon to the workers at Ferrari, telling them “the nature of metal” can be “honed and shaped with your skills into an engine with power to speed us through the world,” and after Enzo’s team loses a race to rival Maserati, he questions their commitment, saying they should be willing to put their lives on the line to win. “Our deadly passion, our terrible joy,” he calls it. The film captures moments on the track with equal amounts of excitement and terror, with one visceral sequence consisting of handheld cameras whipping around as cars zoom by paired with shots that place the viewer in the driver’s adrenaline-fueled cockpit.
But Mann also shows that this way of life comes at a cost. If Enzo had previously built a wall around his heart when two of his close friends died while racing in 1933, after Dino’s passing, he completely enclosed it with armor as strong as the steel he constructs his cars with. He and Laura visit their son’s grave site separately, trapped in their own grief. These emotional beats are where Ferrari shines, culminating in an opera where the characters look back at times now tinged with sadness. Enzo sees his past self playing with Dino, Laura thinks back to a moment when her family was still together and Lina recalls Enzo’s elated reaction when she told him that she was pregnant.
These inner conflicts highlight the cast’s exemplary performances. Enzo’s many contradictions could have resulted in a disastrous portrayal, but Driver is able to make him believable, shaping the role into a man struggling to paper over the cracks of his façade. At points he appears unmoved to setbacks, but he shows a surprising warmth when around Lina and Piero. Cruz may be the most memorable here, playing Laura as composed and observant in business decisions as co-founder of Ferrari but also deranged enough to shoot a gun at her husband to get his attention. Together, they are able to find a wicked balance in the couple’s relationship as Enzo and Laura chaotically push and pull at each other.
The screenplay ties these elements together into a portrait of an undead being, a vampire who will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Enzo is obsessed to the degree needed for capital to function, pursuing speed above all and knocking down everything and everyone else. “Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space or the same moment in time,” he says. Since his 1981 feature film debut, Thief, Mann has picked at what eats away at our dreams–running out of money. In Enzo’s case, he crafts his art in an automotive industry where not coming in first is failure, forcing ugly choices that end in suffering. It’s bleak, but it’s true and essential to our time.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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