FERRARI is an exceptional immersive experience. Not just for the way it virtually puts you in the driver’s seat during the racing sequences, but also, and moreso, for the way it puts you in the mind of its title character as he negotiates a major turning point in his life. Michael Mann’s opus about the legendary engineer spins this one episode in 1957 into a satisfyingly complete biography of how life shaped the man who shaped auto racing.
For Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), life is a series of those ci-mentioned and extremely delicate negotiations with his volatile wife and business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz), his tender, mostly undemanding, mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), whose existence like that of their son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), is a carefully guarded secret from Laura, and the business he built from scratch after World War II that is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
It’s a perfect storm of looming disaster personally and professionally. Lina wants Enzo to formally recognize their son, Laura must be coaxed into signing over her shares in the company so that Enzo can negotiate freely for funding to keep the company solvent, and his latest attempt to keep the land speed record ends with the death of the driver. The deliberately slow pace Mann maintains as Enzo negotiates with his women, his peers, and plays the media with a master’s touch, builds the pressure facing him. Each compromise, each conversation, has everything hanging in the balance, and each creates consequences that are long-term and unpredictable, culminating in the Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile race on Italy’s roads that comprises the last part of the film, and the event that will establish the preeminent car manufacturer, racing or private, in Italy.
Driver is a model of focus, staying self-contained under that pressure, allowing uncertainty only to surface when we accompany him to the tomb of his dead son by Laura on of his daily visits. With him, everything is as calibrated as his engines, even the endless joy he takes in his surviving son, or dealing with a tragedy that will end his career. Driver is working on several levels at once and succeeding in all of them.
This is, however, Ms. Cruz’s film as his polar opposite in temperament. Channeling her inner Anna Magnani, she is a feral creature in whose hands a fountain pen is as deadly as a handgun, both of which she wields with aplomb. Cruz marches through the film with haunted eyes, propelled by all the ways that life has cheated her. Yet, there is also an unquenchable sadness that despises pity, which manifests in the wayward hair and bitter set of her mouth. Hers is an abrasive affect that keeps the grief from manifesting into the violence roiling within. Cruz has given this smart, capable woman the dignity she has earned. You would not want to have an espresso with her caustic personality, but watching her from a safe distance is fascinating, and her howls of pain are as heartbreaking as they are justified.
They are so good that they eclipse a worthy supporting cast. They include Woodley’s grit as the understanding other woman; Daniela Piperno as Enzo’s disapproving mother as embittered as Laura; Patrick Dempsey as a golden-aged driver with charismatic arrogance; Gabriel Leone as the new driver on Ferrari’s team with everything to prove; and Sarah Gadon as his Hollywood starlet girlfriend, whose delicate posterior is smoothly moved aside by Enzo the better to show off the company logo a the press’s camera bulbs pop.
The racing sequences are as dynamic as they are immersive. Cars race through narrow city streets and trace equally narrow mountain roads. There is always the possibility of death, as demonstrated early on as a car and driver fly silently through the air as the camera traces their trajectory dispassionately. The line between life and death is so fine as to be invisible, and held at bay by a wisp of metal or one split-second decision. The behind-the-scenes glimpses of the minutiae of racing are fascinating. The last-minute coaching by Enzo as the start the race that will make or break him, the letters the drivers write to loved ones in case they are killed, and the kid who is gifted with a driver’s leftover snack.
Mann has also dynamically edited the non-racing sequences, delicately cutting between scenes in real time, or people separately listening to the same music, and remembering a past that might be idealized with the passage of time. He creates a backstory without egregious exposition, while also explaining the present with a few carefully chosen images.
FERRARI presents a man so compartmentalized, so driven by his deadly passion for racing that he is in isolation despite being surrounded by people. The power of that personality, ahem, drives a film that will make you understand what made him tick, and feel an unexpected empathy for what it did to his life.
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