NYFF 2023 Film Review: Ferrari
“OUR DEADLY PASSION, OUR TERRIBLE JOY.”
Michael Mann’s Ferrari disguises the fissures of masculinity in the typical rhythms of biographical fare, but the sheer amount of texture and feeling hidden between the lines — and within Adam Driver’s craggy, steely performance — is staggering. Intimate, somber failings juxtaposed with screeching banshee metal and spitfire ambition, their non-reconciliation a feature and not a bug: a full-blooded film years in the making. Minor spoilers ahead…
Towards the end of Michael Mann’s Heat, Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna speaks his credo as the fallout settles from his whirlwind chase of Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley. He’s resigned to the words of his beleaguered wife, now become his own: “All I am is what I’m going after.” The line is dropped with the weight of a feather, only minutes before the fateful - and final - confrontation between the two adversaries, but it might as well be an atomic bomb. Leaping off the screen to ripple through Mann’s entire filmography, Hanna’s words describe the central tension present in everything from Thief to The Insider to Public Enemies: damaged men, their monastic focus, and the terrible fallout of their obsessions. Ferrari is no different in plumbing its subject’s ruthlessness and cold-steel ambition, but it just might be Mann’s most emotionally stinging work that paints the full-blooded facets of a single man, always in conversation but never reconciled. “Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space.”
A chronicle of a single summer in 1957 when go-fast magnate Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) prepares his fleet of racecars for Italy’s infamous and deadly Mille Miglia, Ferrari pinpoints a crossroads for the entrepreneur. With cars fumbling on the tracks, the company’s balance sheet in disarray, and advisors goading him to sell his company to automotive titans such as Ford and Fiat, Enzo is laser-focused for his engines to win the treacherous thousand-mile race. Elsewhere, his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their secret son are on a collision course with Laura (Penelope Cruz), Enzo’s long-suffering wife and equal-partner consigliere. For the Ferraris, the fateful 1957 is also tinged with tragedy: just a year prior, Enzo and Laura’s 24-year-old son Alfredo succumbed to muscular dystrophy, leaving a hole in their marriage never to be filled.
“A movie of contrasts, contradictions, and feelings between the lines, Mann’s latest mines for the thorny human paradoxes that mirror its partitioned structure.”
With Ferrari, Michael Mann juggles so many shards of Enzo - a man with his teeth grit upon a reckless mission - that it seems nigh impossible to catch all the pieces. And in many cases, he doesn’t. It’s easy to see how the film garnered chilly receptions out of Venice and New York this year, but Ferrari’s jaggedness is a feature, not a bug. A movie of contrasts, contradictions, and feelings between the lines, Mann’s latest mines for the thorny human paradoxes that mirror its partitioned structure. “Enzo, build a wall,” Ferrari commands himself. Perhaps it’s the only way for a cutthroat auto baron to exist in Modena, where racing is apotheosis: a holy town of roaring motors where priests wax poetic about engines and churchgoers bring their own stopwatches to service, timed to the distant sounds of starting guns.
Late style Michael Mann finds the 80-year-old director digging deeper for complicated emotional truths: Ferrari is more than just spectacular detonations of steel and gore, it’s a clash of dueling human natures. For a film strewn with burning rubber and twisted metal, it opens with a surprising softness. Enzo rouses from sleep, careful as not to wake his lover, and pulls a blanket over his son; slinking out of the house, he painstakingly pushes his car from his driveway before starting its rumbling engine. At the tracks, however, a racer in one of Ferrari’s machines is gruesomely obliterated in a crash, and the dead man’s replacement is already hitting asphalt the next day. “If you get in to one of my cars, you get in to win,” Enzo coldly admonishes. The gentle family man has evaporated. Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space.
Adam Driver, in a cropped silver wig playing someone 20 years his senior, has seemingly warped his silly Italian accent even more since last year’s House of Gucci, but like many great biographical performances, his Enzo Ferrari is about evocation: any flaws of imitation are vaporized by the fires of certainty behind his eyes, alive with soulfulness. Driver easily drills straight into the center of his subject’s inner conflict, a pained knowing of the cost of propulsion, the cost of never standing still. It’s evident as he walks through Modena, his furrowed determination in contrast with his jubilant, enthusiastic drivers that either don’t know or don’t care that nearly half of them will die behind the wheel; it’s evident when he talks to his dead son in the family crypt, lamenting his mistakes and the lives cut short under his employ.
“[Adam] Driver easily drills straight into the center of his subject’s inner conflict, a pained knowing of the cost of propulsion, the cost of never standing still.”
As great as Driver is, Penelope Cruz is perhaps even better as Laura. If Enzo is all hard-nosed compartmentalization and steel will, then Laura is the ferocious, fiery spirit that’s inextricably been grafted to his being. A history of pain, grief, and suffering has created permanent fissures in the Ferrari marriage, but Laura’s gravity - and business acumen - is immense. She’s first in line to unload a revolver at her adulterous husband’s head, but she’s also the one to pull the company name out of the fire. Mann even paints their sadness in different shades. The Ferraris - whose son’s death has driven a wedge between them - make pilgrimages to the mausoleum separately; where Enzo wallows in somber communion, speaking to his child about his trials and failures, Laura can only sit in silence, gazing at Dino’s resting place as tears stream down her face. Cruz plays up a put upon wife’s tempestuousness, but it’s the quiet moments that make her performance shine.
But just because Ferrari is so dense in emotional richness doesn’t mean that Mann has forgotten the more visceral pleasures - and horrors - of the sport. “Brake later,” Enzo tells his drivers. Director of photography Erik Messerschmidt shoots the face-peeling racing sequences with a similar bravado: combined with Andy Nelson’s piercing sound design, the movie screams to life as a maelstrom of mangled metal and subsonic velocity. And it’s in these moments that Mann reminds us of the deadly consequences of Enzo’s determination. He’s a killer. The people in his cars - “in the metal I made” - die. Even if you’re familiar with history and the morbid turns of 1957’s motor scene, Ferrari’s frankness with its violence might shock you, throwing you into perhaps the single most horrific depiction vehicular mayhem ever committed to film.
Like much of Mann’s late oeuvre, Ferrari is sure to be divisive. Those that bristled against the perceived unevenness of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat will likely have no love for his “biopic,” but true appreciators of the filmmaker’s post-2000s work know that no one is pushing texture, form, and pure human feeling quite like Michael Mann. Ferrari’s “failure” as biography is its rousing success as poetry: the rhythm of irreconcilable dichotomies, the prison of masculinity, the fiery synthesis of metal and religion. Michael Mann speaks of Ferrari as the culmination of his life’s work, and it sure feels like it. There’s simply no one doing it like him.
