Ferrari is all about fast cars and intense marital drama, my bread and butter as a motor racing adulterer myself. Michael Mann has come back after an eight year hiatus as a film director to present a character study on someone who is undoubtedly influential in the world of not only motor racing, but cars in general. Adam Driver continues to be typecast as a rich Italian man who has very little regard for monogamy, alongside some middling ensemble and a standout Penelope Cruz.
This film is not a biopic, chronicling Enzo’s life from birth to race to death. It is a brief window in the man’s life, a pivotal three months in 1957, where Ferrari was facing some steep competition from Maserati, his unfaithfulness was coming to a head and the company of Ferrari was on its financial knees.
We see some brief, and admittedly silly shots of Adam Driver living up to his name and taking the wheel to drive an open wheel race early in his life. The blending of stock footage and made to match did not work for me, looking like a cheap simulator with a fan blowing his hair back. That was brief though, as we get the title card and jump to 1957, where our story takes place.
Enzo wakes up next to Lina Lardi, his “mistress” whom he has had a son with. He makes his way home to his wife, Laura. Who immediately brings up his sleeping around, she knows about it and is not entirely bothered by it, only by the fact that he didn’t come home before the maid arrives with coffee. She is under the impression that Enzo is out with different women, having meaningless encounters with them.
We then go into some pretty tragic car testing, before Alfonso De Portago puts himself forward to be a quick replacement to Ferrari’s star driver lineup. This story leads up to the Mille Miglia race, one spanning about 1,000 miles across Italy. We watch as Ferrari prep their drivers, cars and in the meantime, how Enzo navigates a crumbling marriage to Laura.
The film is in depth in parts, focusing heavily on the Enzo Ferrari aspect of Ferrari, which you would expect in a character study. However, at times this heavy focus takes away from some of the emotional payoffs later on down the line. The film is around two hours and ten minutes, with some scenes that I could definitely have swapped out for ones that build up the world around Enzo, allowing you to connect to other elements of the story. I would say this is particularly the case with the state of Ferrari as a company, the financial threat looms over the film but never really enforces the gravity of the outcomes that could have happened. I would have also loved to get a bit more of a look into the drivers, where I can only really recall two of them by any measure of characteristics.
It's not time to talk about acting, it's time to talk about accents. I had no major problems with Adam Driver’s accent, which floated around Italy and Eastern Europe throughout the film, but had a strange consistency to it. Penelope Cruz, no notes, good for you Dolmio Girl. Shailene Woodley is someone who I rate quite highly, enjoying her work in series like Big Little Lies or her recent performance in Dumb Money. However, in this film, she is weighed down with the responsibility of trying to keep her accent sounding authentic, which it unfortunately doesn’t. The others have less lines and therefore less input from me.
Now that I have given my expertise on Italian accents, it's time for my expertise on the technical creation of the film!
The camera work in this film is impressive, blending the high speed chases of the races with the slow and emotional scenes with dynamic angles. The camera work on the racing sequences is particularly impressive, along with the editing of the footage, keeping up a high pace, building tension and raising stakes. The camera is not gliding along with the cars, its shakes and bumps with the road, showing how fragile these paper thin metal chassis are. It captures on boards of the cars, relaying the true speed of the cars on these tight roads, with no safety barriers and oftentimes, people just standing around clapping like cars aren’t zipping by at 140 miles an hour. My only complaint about the look is the editing at times from scene to scene would cut from dark to light quite suddenly, burning my corneas off.
My corneas may have been burnt off but my ears stayed intact, to hear the sweet sounds of those engines ripping by the screen, mixed to match the environments and playing into my inner man with its deep rumbles travelling through my body. These scenes got all the mixing budget though, because at times, the dialogue was like a rollercoaster of volume, being inaudible at points and booming out the speakers at others.
The music blends in pretty well, enhancing the moments it's in, and doesn’t get in the way of the story. Nothing too notable there.
Overall, we have a solid look into an influential man, who I'm sure is more problematic than the film lets on. We see his business and personal life face monumental obstacles in a short span of time, but maybe a bit too much time in the film. I think this film could have been really excellent if at times the focus was shifted slightly to flesh out other characters. Instead we get a good character study with the door open for another filmmaker to come in and glaze over his life in yet another American adaptation of a European story, suspending your disbelief that nobody speaks Italian in Italy.
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