Review: Michael Mann's "Ferrari" is fierce, focused, and devastating

Straightforward for Mann, but no less effective

Michael Mann makes movies about dangerously obsessed men, men whose obsessions eat others – or, more often, themselves – alive.

This has always been the controlling idea of his career, and almost certainly will be as long as he continues to live and work (which I hope will be for many years to come). Such focus gives Mann the necessary clarity of vision when it comes to tackling a project like Ferrari, which is a doubly dangerous undertaking as both a biopic (the most creatively bankrupt of all Hollywood genres) and a passion project (Mann has been trying to make the film for a quarter of a century, and plenty of great directors have seen once-great ideas curdle with that long a gestation). Mann is interested in Enzo Ferrari because he recognizes the deadly obsession beneath the man’s placid exterior as one of his subjects, different in occupation and personality than the cops and criminals of Thief, Heat, and Miami Vice, but not different in kind; and he is interested in Enzo Ferrari at the very specific juncture in the man’s life this film queues in on – a few weeks in the summer of 1957, leading up to that year’s Mille Miglia – because it crystallizes what makes the subject interesting into an intense pressure cooker of passion and pathos. Mann does not come to Ferrari because of the man’s notoriety and then search for a story to tell, as do the vast majority of biopics; he first and foremost has a theme to explore, and he comes to Ferrari because the man’s story, which just so happens to be true, opens an extremely compelling perspective on that theme. Mann’s Ferrari does not exist to celebrate or extol or give viewers a cradle-to-the-grave history lesson on the real-life Enzo Ferrari; the film does not care if you like him, and it has no designs on deifying him. It finds him fascinating, and desires to understand him, and given the sweep of Mann’s career, it inevitably feels personal, as though understanding something about the obsessions of Enzo Ferrari will illuminate something deeper about the obsessions of Michael Mann.

Like most worthwhile biopics, Ferrari keeps its focus tight on a small slice of Enzo’s life, the parts standing in for the whole. Ferrari (Adam Driver) and his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) lost their son Dino to muscular dystrophy the year before, and the first sign of the film’s greatness comes in a pair of scenes where Enzo and Laura visit his tomb separately. Enzo talks to his departed son about the troubles of the day, a one-sided conversation that grows into a monologue, and then into powerful sobbing; Laura stands quietly, smiles softly, and allows a few tears to run down her cheeks. Driver and Cruz are equally powerful in their radically juxtaposed performances here, even as they each take different paths to express a very similar, overwhelming grief.

Enzo is dividing his time between Laura and his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom he had a son, Piero, twelve years prior; Laura knows Enzo sleeps around, but does not know he has another relationship this serious, let alone another son. Husband and wife are also struggling with the Ferrari company’s finances, which they manage together, and Enzo is assembling a racing team for the upcoming Mille Miglia, where he intends to demonstrate the dominance of his cars and their drivers – and, in so doing, supercharge sales of their consumer automobiles. In the second scene that makes it clear we are watching something special, several of these themes and conflicts intersect as Enzo attends Church with his wife and his co-workers; as the Priest gives his sermon, Enzo listens closely to the sounds of a nearby track where Maserati is attempting to beat Ferrari’s speed record. There are more stopwatches in use within the church than out on the track, as Enzo and his men worship a different God, the one who actually commands their hearts.

Ferrari is the most stylistically ‘traditional’ film Mann has made in the 2000s. Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography is gorgeous, rich and awash in sensory detail – it is his second great achievement in 2023 after David Fincher’s The Killer, which shares more than enough thematic links to make a good double feature – but it is not coloring radically outside the industry’s lines the way Mann and Dion Beebe were in Collateral and Miami Vice, their early digital works. The film is narratively straightforward, editorially adventurous or expressionistic on only one major occasion – a scene where Enzo visits the opera and sees memories refracted back on him, unbidden, by the music – and scored with great tenderness by composer Daniel Pemberton (also in his second great contribution to cinema this year after Across the Spider-Verse). Where Miami Vice or Blackhat feel a bit like accidents – works of barely-controlled chaos that are great because of their willingness to genuinely experiment, to live on the edge – Ferrari is made with clockwork precision: steady, often quiet, resolutely clear-eyed. This both reflects the character of its main subject, who holds himself tightly at nearly all times, but is also essential in how the film presents its two major moments of shocking violence, one of which is a prelude to the other, both of provide the narrative and thematic lynchpins to the story being told. This violence is direct, matter-of-fact, and unadorned; there is no slow-motion or excessive lingering after the fact. It just happens, immediately and in full view, which makes the horror all the more palpable, and the straightforwardly brutal cost of Enzo’s ambition all the more terrifying. He spends the entire film mourning a son; other children die in his wake, and their lives are snuffed out in the blink of an eye.

If Ferrari is a great film about obsessions, then it is also a great film about a once-loving marriage now hanging by a thread – a partnership that must endure even though the romance has gone. As the two halves of that partnership, Driver and Cruz are both outstanding. Some will no doubt debate whether Driver’s accent works (it did not bother me, and all the accents are enough of a piece with each other that one quickly stops thinking about it), but I am much more in awe of how he acts with his entire body. Look at his eyes. Look at the way he holds himself as he walks. This is a performance built from the inside out, a performance that extends to each limb and each step, one where you can feel the thought, the commitment, and the sublimated emotion bubbling underneath at all times. It is quietly towering work, and is equaled in every way by Cruz, who is all fire and ferocity where Driver is quiet and repressive. As played by Cruz, Laura is a raw nerve, frayed by grief and infidelity and the stress of running a business with a husband who is more interested in challenging death than balancing a budget. Each actor is stupendous on their own, but when they are on screen together, both performances, and the film as a whole, are elevated immensely. They communicate the weight of the years these people have spent together, the disappointment they have in each other and themselves, the immense sadness of having lost their identity as a family.

In fact, if Ferrari makes any missteps, it is that it chooses to end not on the final exchange between Driver and Cruz – a brutally effective piece of writing and acting that crystallizes the film’s professional and personal themes into a devasting denouement – but one last moment focusing on Enzo; it is a fine scene, but a lesser ending than the one that slips through the film’s immediate grasp. I could also have done without the few sentences of explanatory text before the credits; it is the film’s only concession to biopic tropes, and it is unnecessary. The film is not and does not aspire to be a history lesson, and viewers can look up whatever they want to learn on their phones afterward. The film imparts its actual themes and ideas perfectly well without the written epilogue.

These are, to be clear, small complaints. Ferrari is indeed one of the year’s best films, a smart and riveting character-driven drama that builds to one of the darkest, most devastating punches I have seen in quite some time. Michael Mann is playing things straighter here than he has in some time, but he is also playing for keeps. Only a true master of the form could deliver the blows this film lands.  

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