Ferrari (currently playing at The Onyx in Nevada City) successfully welds the sports pic and the bio pic into the kind of entertaining, often heart-stopping, film worth leaving your house for.
Sports pics and biopics each come with unique problems. In a sports movie, it’s rare for the off-field drama to outshine the on-field drama—do you want to watch the Super Bowl, or watch the players waiting to play it? Most sports movies fail on this point.
Biopics, meanwhile, wrestle to form a narrative spine out of a long, busy, and often deeply flawed life, reshaping it into a palatable experience for a mainstream audience. All while trying to shrink it all into a limited running time that creates a Classics Illustrated of a life.
Ferrari assembles both genres together to often superb effect. Director Michael Mann spent nearly thirty years developing the project, longer than it took Enzo Ferrari (and his wife, Laura) to build the company. Mann has spent the time well, forging a vivid, compelling portrait of one of the world’s most famous sports entrepreneurs, whose cars won more Formula 1 and other racing events than any in the sport’s history. With the drama comes thrilling glimpses of a sport of “deadly passion and terrible joys.”
The film opens in the 1920s with grainy B&W documentary footage of a young Enzo Ferrari (a well-CGI-ed Adam Driver) behind the wheel of a racer wearing the aggressive grin of a man who’s found his calling. A clumsy jump into the future lands us in 1957, a crucial year for Ferrari who, nearing sixty, long retired from driving, but now an irascible titan of the auto industry, is now bedeviled by crises, on the track, in the boardroom, and in his private life.
Dino, his only son from his marriage to Laura Ferrari (Penelope Cruz), has died the year before of muscular dystrophy. Though the couple live together, their estrangement is so deep that they visit Dino’s tomb separately, their pain lost on one another. Laura is a fearsomely jealous creature—rightfully, I will add—enough to draw a pistol and fire a warning shot at him in their kitchen while Enzo’s mother (Daniela Piperno) knowingly looks on.
Yet a strong bond links the pair: their co-ownership of Ferrari, the company they built starting at the end of World War II. It’s a partnership they both need, and one that faces risks from several directions.
One of the biggest risks entails Enzo’s secret life with his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), whom he can never publicly acknowledge. The exposure of this relationship would cause Ferrari, one of the most famous men in the piously Catholic Italy of the time, huge public embarrassment and the possible loss of his fortune, a standard of public morality that seems strange in our age.
Ferrari dotes on his hidden family, the one spot of kindness in a life lived with high-speed ambition. Outside that cozy world, there’s his company, racing, and little else. But even in racing, he’s facing crises, frantically stretching himself among his three worlds. Rather than an example of successful compartmentalization, Enzo’s life is more like a three-legged table: Take one leg away, it will not stand.
One of his favored drivers died in a crash two years before, and, early in the film, he witnesses another driver die in an especially horrible accident. Already the brusquest of businessmen, Ferrari decides intimacy is the enemy and further thickens his armor against loss, understandable in such a dangerous sport where death lurks at every turn.
Addressed as “il Commendatore” by all, his crude aggression and ambition denies any sentiment, even for his drivers’ familial and romantic attachments: “When a mother interferes,” he sternly lectures, “death follows.” He demands relentless dedication from everyone. “You get into one of my cars, you get in to win,” he declares, a command that likely includes his chauffeur.
But in 1957, Ferrari cars are neither winning nor selling like they used to, thanks to competition from Fiat and others who are doing it better. Facing bankruptcy, the company must seek an outside partnership to survive. (Ferrari’s struggles also play a role in the excellent Ford v. Ferrari from 2019.) He must also design a better, faster car. Another route to back to the top, Enzo figures, would be to enter his cars in the upcoming Mille Miglia, a grueling and frightful thousand-mile, open-road endurance race. (So many drivers were killed on the course over the years, they eventually had to cancel the race for good.)
The script by Troy Kennedy Martin (who died in 2009) hits the mark here as this single event—the Big Race—contribute to a narrative throughline that contrasts well with Enzo’s private dramas, though the juxtaposition occasionally causes the pace to lag.
With Laura gripping the purse strings, Enzo lacks enough power on his own to negotiate a deal, forcing him to negotiate with her for help. This she may well be unwilling to do, especially once she learns about her husband’s secret family. It’s the intrigue, both emotional and financial, between the pair, including scorching quarrels over their grief over Dino, marital loyalty, and the fate of the company they built, that primarily steer the off-track drama. Eventually it all leads to the heart stopping Mille Miglia, a race captured with exhilaration and horror, thanks to the skills of cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and editor Pietro Scalia.
Ferrari is that rare sports movie where the drama off the track successfully competes with the drama on the track. As a “factual fiction” it seems to stick reasonably close to events (as analyzed here at “History v. Hollywood.”), though it smooths down some of the crudity that was said to be central to Ferrari’s personality.
Mann’s direction and Martin’s script do Ferrari and us the service of making him a genuinely compelling character. In a year crowded with biopics, this one rates among the best, better than Maestro and Goldaand well ahead of Napoleon (though not to the heights of Oppenheimer, where the stakes—the fate of humanity–are so much higher).
The film has the epic scope Golda lacks and focusses better on Ferrari’s endeavors in his field than Maestro did with Leonard Bernstein and his music. Both Maestro and Ferrari deal well with the costs incurred by those living within the blast radius of famous men, but Maestro rather fails to link Bernstein’s life with his art. In Ferrari, the links are strong and clear.
Like so many biopics, the film comes to a simple stop; not this time for death but for a small, kind gesture that leaves a note of hope for both Enzo’s future and that of his family. “Great” men are never “nice” men but sometimes show their grace in small private gestures.
Enzo Ferrari is one of those ultra-competent professionals who once featured in the films of Howard Hawks (who made his own race-car movie in 1965, Redline 7000). In Adam Driver, Michael Mann has the perfect actor to play him. Driver captures Ferrari’s wolfish charisma and strutting ambition, revealing the man’s um driven nature. The makeup team, led by Shaun Smith, have also convincingly added twenty years to the forty-year-old actor. Driver masterly maneuvers between the three poles of Ferrari’s emotional private selves and his rough public façade, to give us a man often unlikable, sometimes touching, but always fascinating.
Racing right alongside Driver, Penelope Cruz roars like a tiger as Laura Ferrari. Laura is both torrentially passionate and admirably shrewd as she outmaneuvers her husband. Cruz’s ruthless stare from those deep brown eyes reduces everyone she targets to quivering mud, even Enzo. The two actors explode when they’re together. Shailene Woodley, meanwhile, successfully plays quieter notes as Lina Lardi, the gentle patient refuge in Enzo’s life. With so much star power on display, it’s not surprising that most of the other actors get left behind as the rest race across the finish line.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in last year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark.