Michael Mann has made a career from sleek, muscular portraits of masculinity in crisis.
Beneath their cool, calibrated surfaces, the veteran American director's films — concerning cops and robbers (Heat, Miami Vice), hitmen and hackers (Collateral, Blackhat), gangsters and safe crackers (Public Enemies, Thief) — thrum with the existential dread of life's impermanence, the romance of seizing the moment.
("Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat," goes Robert De Niro's famous line in Heat.)
No wonder he's long been drawn to making a film about motor racing driver turned auto designer Enzo Ferrari — a man whose predilection for speed and success was tempered by a persistent sense of impending doom. (Not for nothing is his 1964 autobiography entitled My Terrible Joys.)
Loading...Set in 1957, Ferrari finds its eponymous motor magnate — played by everyone's favourite Italian, House of Gucci star Adam Driver — at a professional and private impasse.
Nearing 60, he's built a company that's seen him become a national treasure, elevating him to near-godlike status.
"If he were alive today, Jesus wouldn't have been a carpenter but a craftsmen of metal," a priest tells a congregation of Ferrari and his mechanics, assembled in a church that borders the racetrack in the boss's hometown of Modena.
The standing of Ferrari's brand — and his personal legacy — is less certain.
The business is on the verge of insolvency, with the output of Ferrari production cars insufficient to meet the company's spending on racing — where Enzo's true passion lies.
For years he's run the company with his wife, the steely firebrand Laura (a crackling Penélope Cruz), but personal tensions are beginning to threaten their business partnership.
They're both dealing with grief over the recent loss of their teenage son, Dino, who died from muscular dystrophy. Every morning, Ferrari visits the mausoleum where his son and late brother, Alfredo, are entombed. He's talking to ghosts.
And while Laura tolerates her husband's affairs, she's about to uncover a bombshell: For a decade Enzo has been seeing Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), a younger woman with whom he has another son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese).
Under pressure to ramp up production or make a deal with a more commercial enterprise like Fiat or Ford — the latter the focus of Ford v Ferrari, a project Mann was once attached to direct — Ferrari decides to wager his fortunes on the upcoming Mille Miglia, the legendary 1,000-mile race across Italy.
A contemplative, sometimes mournful film, Ferrari echoes Mann's career obsession with the high-stakes balance between the professional and the private, zooming in on the specialised details of both business and pleasure.
As the stoic but embattled figure at the centre of the drama, Driver embodies the movie's sombre, reflective mood. His quiet, detached performance — coupled with his eerily youthful appearance — can make him seem like a man out of time, haunted by the cosmic balance.
His scenes with Cruz are pure melodrama; the clash of acting styles generates a friction that gives their moments together an electric charge.
Mann's staging of the racing sequences, meanwhile, is unsurprisingly gripping.
The action has a kinetic punch that puts the audience right in the driver's seat, while the filmmaker's attention to track-side details — from the leather jackets and sunglasses to Ferrari's choice of ties — reflect a craftsman's eye for authenticity. (At one point, Enzo tells a new driver to keep his actress girlfriends away from the track, because "they distract from my cars".)
Still, for all of Ferrari's craft and passion, the elements don't always coalesce in an effective whole.
Working from a decades-old script by the late writer Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job), Mann sometimes struggles to find the film's centre of gravity, torn between the exhilaration of the cars and dramatic moments that can play as soap opera.
As a work about legacy, though, it's fascinating one — especially coming from an 80-year-old filmmaker who may well have cause to reflect on his own life.
Ferrari is a film in which triumph and tragedy are twinned, where the ghosts of the past can appear as vivid as the living. For fans of Mann's singular body of work, it's ultimately quite moving.
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2024-01-03 22:24:39Z
CBMiWGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTAxLTA0L2ZlcnJhcmktcmV2aWV3LWFkYW0tZHJpdmVyLW1pY2hhZWwtbWFubi8xMDMyNzg2NTDSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzMjc4NjUw
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