Review of Michael Mann’s film “Ferrari”

Michael Mann’s first full-length film in eight years, Ferrari, based on the biography of the founder of the famous automobile brand, is being released. Work on the director’s dream project lasted even longer – almost thirty years, and during this time he lost most of his horsepower, he believes Julia Shagelman.

When giving interviews about his new long-awaited film (his previous feature, the failed thriller Cyber, was released in 2015), Michael Mann emphasized that he did not want to make a long, detailed biopic. Such stories about the life of a hero from birth to death, in his opinion, are appropriate in the form of documentaries on the History Channel. So the events of Ferrari are compressed into four months in 1957, when car tycoon Enzo Ferrari (a stoic, gray-wigged Adam Driver), by then a recognized Italian national treasure, tried to save his company from bankruptcy. And at the same time – if you believe the film, of course – he was dealing with problems in his family life, which was also on the verge of a crisis.

This approach may have been new in the early 1990s, when Mann first received a script from Troy Kennedy-Martin (who died in 2009), based on sports journalist Brock Yates’ biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man and a car.” Now it has become rather the norm: of the biopics that continue to be released in batches every year closer to the dates of announcement of nominations for various awards, over the past five to seven years you can quickly count the exceptions with a traditional structure on your fingers. This technique, in theory, should give everything that happens on the screen a sense of urgency, immediacy, heightened emotional and plot stakes, turning it into a magnifying glass that enlarges the characters’ characters, revealed in extraordinary circumstances.

Surprisingly, in Ferrari, whose main character is obsessed with high speeds and a competitive spirit, all this is completely absent. The film moves leisurely from one scene to the next with the rhythm of a horse-drawn carriage rather than a racing car, which is quite unusual for Mann, who became famous for such muscular, spring-loaded films as Heat (1995), Ali (2001) and “Accomplice” (2004). Only in its last quarter (and it lasts a good 130 minutes), having entered the track of the legendary Mille Miglia rally, does Ferrari finally decide to inject some adrenaline into the spectators’ veins – in a truly creepy scene, sadistically detailed and at the same time discouragingly cynical.

All we have time to learn about the hero: he is an unpleasant, tight-fisted guy who underpays his workers, treats racers as expendable, and has been cheating on his long-suffering wife Laura for twelve years (Penelope Cruz, who completely outshines her on-screen partners in the role of yet another woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown ), who founded the company with him and takes an active part in its work, and all these years, under various pretexts, refuses to give her last name to the son who was born to his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley in the thankless role of a fighting friend who knows her place). Why should we root for Enzo Ferrari to win this race, and not his rivals from, for example, Maserati?

The answer proposed by the authors is more likely to belong to the era of “dad’s cinema” when the script was written than to the current one, reflecting on the dominant role of men in power in society. Enzo Ferrari is simply Enzo Ferrari, a great man. What this greatness is, the film does not decipher; it is presented as a given, emphasized also visually by the way the two-meter Driver hangs over the rest of the cast (the real prototype had the typical appearance of a middle-aged, bald, plump Italian and was more than average in height). In his native Modena, he is a king and a god, occupying a place of honor both in the church pew (while the priest says that if Jesus were born today, that is, in 1957, he would not be a carpenter, but an auto factory worker) and in the opera hall.

Racing for him is “a fatal passion and a murderous joy,” although he himself has not driven a racing car since the 1920s (in the prologue we see stylized black-and-white footage of a happy Enzo on the track). Therefore, now everyone else makes sacrifices to this passion-joy: engineers, mechanics and workers – with time and nerves, pilots – with their lives, women – with long years of waiting for him to honor them with his attention and – in Laura’s case – controlling shares. This status quo is again presented for granted, without any reflection, and journalists, who after the death of another racer call Enzo “Saturn devouring his children,” appear in the film as narrow-minded scribblers, playing on the base interests of the public and refusing to see the full and unbiased picture. It is possible – and even most likely – that racing was also a fatal passion for the Maserati brothers, but they will have to wait for their film to become beautiful figures of operatic proportions.