Editor’s note, Dec. 22, 2023: This piece was published following a screening of Ferrari at the New York Film Festival. We’re resurfacing it now that the movie is about to hit theaters.
In Heat, Robert De Niro’s master thief Neil McCauley is reading a massive tome titled Stress Fractures in Titanium. For Neil, whose livelihood depends on drilling through stainless steel, such a book is surely required reading, and it does end up doubling as a nice icebreaker with the woman at the counter next to him—but the book also has a deeper meaning. No director is more interested in hairline fissures than Michael Mann, whose protagonists tend to be men defined by their iron will. The genre isn’t important; whether the protagonist in question is a safecracker, a blackhat hacker, a TV producer, or a mojito fiend, the drama lies in seeing how those hard, gleaming facades hold up in the face of constant and catastrophic damage.
At a New York Film Festival screening of his new film, Ferrari, a dapper, gum-chewing Mann described his long-gestating project as both a “truly independent film” and a “labor of love.” The idea of an ultra-commercial pro like Mann working outside the studio system is fascinating, as is his collaboration with the art-house, independent distributor Neon; it suggests a measure of creative freedom after the compromises that afflicted his last film, Blackhat, nearly a decade ago.
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As for labor and love, both are key themes in a movie that juxtaposes its subject’s professional and private lives and surveys the wreckage wherever they collide. In telling the story of Italian race-car magnate Enzo Ferrari, who did more to aestheticize the world of automobiles than any other person in the 20th century—an A-list impresario who combined Henry Ford and Giorgio Armani—Mann is dealing with a mythic figure, a man who, after meeting the pope, promised to make him a car. Whether touring the assembly line, pontificating about his sleekly aerodynamic designs, or sparring with the press, the man nicknamed “Commendatore” cut a grand figure. But Mann, one of our most granular filmmakers, is all about little details. There’s a telling moment early in the film when Enzo joins Ferrari’s latest star racer, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), for a publicity shoot and notices that the driver’s girlfriend—a blond movie starlet (Sarah Gadon) with well-practiced red carpet moves—is standing directly in front of the company logo painted on the car. Irritated, he brushes her off like a gnat.
“It is true that I have never met any man whom I thought altogether resembled me,” Ferrari once said, “but only because my faults are so enormous.” The contradictions of a self-deprecating egomaniac are fertile terrain for drama, and Ferrari—based largely on Brock Yates’s book Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine—digs in. Set over three harrowing months in 1957—a dual hinge point in its subject’s professional career and personal life—the film is a compressed epic: an eventful pit stop rather than a hagiographic victory lap. It begins, strategically, in the 1920s, with Ferrari at his peak, having defeated all comers as a daredevil driver. Shot in a black-and-white that mimics the texture of the pre-sound era, the prologue is probably the closest Ferrari gets to the alpha-male hero worship that often defines Mann’s cinema; it also imbues the rest of the film, set on the other side of his physical prime, with a stinging sense of pathos. No longer able to pilot his own sleek, aerodynamic creations, Enzo lives vicariously through his drivers, but he can’t die with them: When a time-trial accident claims a casualty, he reacts dispassionately, as if such things are simply the cost of doing business.
What gradually becomes clear as Ferrari goes on is that Enzo isn’t so much cruel as armored: Things are in disrepair under the hood. He’s reeling from the recent death of his 24-year-old son, Dino, from muscular dystrophy, a disease that broke his household in increments and that contextualizes his disgust for weakness. In the absence of anybody to blame, he’s simply hardened his heart. The question of whether grief justifies his aloofness—or his infidelities—is left open, which is where Mann likes it. Rather than imposing morality on his characters, he prefers to let them wrestle with their own demons. For Enzo, that means considering the request of his younger lover Lina (Shailene Woodley) to publicly acknowledge their 12-year-old son, Piero, who doesn’t question why his father drops in only for occasional visits (and who is oblivious to the fate of his late half-brother). Lina’s reluctance to accept her role as the other woman has left her bitter, but it’s nothing compared to the barely sublimated fury of Enzo’s wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), who stalks through their massive estate like a panther and is not above pointing—and firing—a loaded gun in her husband’s direction to get his increasingly divided attention.
Originally, Mann had been hoping to cast either Christian Bale or Hugh Jackman in the title role of Ferrari; in an interview with Vulture, he explained that he chose Driver—who, at 39, is two decades younger than his character at the time of the film—based on his performance in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. “He’s dedicated,” Mann said of his star. “If something is not going right, he beats himself up pretty good, and I do the same.” Driver validates his director’s faith by giving Enzo some of the same self-lacerating qualities as the antihero he played in Leos Carax’s bizarre rock opera Annette, which would actually make a pretty good double bill with Ferrari as a paternal pathos play in which it’s daddy who has the issues.
“How do we reconcile this?” Lina asks during one argument with Enzo about their seemingly intractable situation. But the wonder of Driver’s performance—beyond the chef’s-kiss Italian accent—is that he makes you feel for both sides of the character’s plight without forgetting that he’s also lying in the bed(s) that he’s made for himself. Staring down two very different women with a claim on his heart, he’s simultaneously endearing, infuriating, and vulnerable. As for Cruz, she takes what could have—and in Mann’s films often has—been a thankless role as a jilted partner and imbues it with dark yet crystalline depths of feeling. When she and Enzo pass each other like ships in the night at Dino’s tomb, it’s as if they’ve made a tacit bond to forget their shared history—but when Laura discovers that her husband has Lina and Piero stashed in the country, her gaze turns to one of piercing, dry-eyed recognition. She sees Enzo for who he is.
Because Laura is the co-owner of Ferrari, she’s determined to have her say about the company, which is introduced in a state of flux. Instead of standing alone—and above—the competition, they must now reckon with the aftermath of their own influence. By the 1950s, Ferrari’s success had yielded a cohort of high-end, custom-tooled challengers, and Mann, who is always interested in the rituals and realities of global capitalism—the politics of labor and exploitation—distills corporate rivalry into high-velocity bloodsport. Where most racing movies are about personal glory, Ferrari is about brand extension. During a strategy session with his team about how to contend against their archrivals from Maserati during the prestigious 1,500-kilometer Mille Miglia—a twisty cross-country odyssey whose outcome will go a long way toward either shoring up Ferrari’s dwindling fortunes or exhausting them—Enzo explains that it’s impossible for two objects to occupy the same space. What he means, to paraphrase Ricky Bobby, is that if Ferrari isn’t first, it’s last. But the line could also apply to the neck-and-neck competition of his domestic life.
There’s also a third, more ominous implication, which is that if a racetrack gets too crowded, somebody’s going to be forced off it, and any viewers familiar with the history of Ferrari unfortunately already know just how right Enzo is. There are bright, vivid colors in Ferrari’s racing scenes and some exciting, suspenseful bits of staging, and yet the director isn’t chasing exhilaration in the Ford v Ferrari mode. Instead, Mann’s movie is death-tinged, cross-cutting between race footage and religious rites in anticipation of its grim final act. In sequence after sequence, we’re alerted to the microscopic differences between a vehicle operating at peak capacity and one that’s been compromised. At first, the consequences are relatively minor, but the pile-up of minor mishaps finally explodes in a set piece that splits the difference between tactile, flesh-and-blood realism and nightmarish stylization. Even in a non-genre film, Mann remains peerless in conveying the physics and metaphysics of extreme violence, with the added chill of knowing that Ferrari’s bloody spectacle is rooted in history. The sheer visceral impact of the imagery pushes things close to horror movie territory.
Mann has never really been a crowd-pleasing filmmaker. Even his most purely satisfying movie, Heat, builds to a climax of chill, existential ambiguity. But where earlier fact-based movies like The Insider and Ali are ultimately paeans to a sort of hard-edged heroism of individuals staring down gargantuan institutions, Ferrari inverts that dynamic to examine a man swallowed up inside his own machine. Enzo’s empire is built on a smoldering pile of collateral damage, and the bargain by which he ultimately reasserts his authority—and evades the consequences of yet another tragedy—is a Faustian one, while the final sequence melds tenderness with a melancholy sense of resignation. What we’re left with in the end is the knowledge of where all roads lead, no matter who’s driving, or who made the car.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.