Ferrari: More terrible than joyful
Jack Baruth
It has been both common and admirable in most of human history to extend the occasional indulgence to both the very aged and the truly great among us. Surely Michael Mann, the 80-year-old director with more than a few of the previous century’s finest films to his credit, is therefore entitled to the double helping of it you’ll need to meander through the first 20 or so minutes of Ferrari, which resembles nothing so much as the various establishing scenes of Heat and Miami Vice that take place after their trademark slam-bang opening sequences. We see Enzo Ferrari, played in essentially unrecognizable fashion by Adam Driver, in company with his mistress, his wife, his mother, his associates, and his local parish. This would be a good time to get some popcorn if you missed your chance during the previews because nothing occurs that will have any impact whatsoever on the rest of the film.
Ferrari doesn’t really crank over until Enzo is approached at the Modena test track by daredevil aristocrat Alfonso de Portago. In real life, Portago was an astounding human being and force of nature who excelled at everything from daredevil flight to bobsled racing, but here he’s a shy, simpering, and slight fellow played by Gabriel Leone, whom the reader will perhaps not recognize from a Brazil-market straight-to-Amazon-Prime-video series. “I don’t need another driver,” Ferrari snaps at him. Five minutes later, when the car being tested fails and slaughters its pilot in a CGI sequence as unrealistic as it is unpleasant, Enzo turns back to Portago: “Come see me Monday.”
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This scene is both crass and historically questionable, but it perfectly captures the truth of Enzo Ferrari the man: He was the sort of fellow who managed to outsource his suffering. A walking externality, if you will. His drivers die, his wife is publicly humiliated. His mistress, Lina, and son Piero live a monastic and secret existence in the country. (In one of the film’s most emotional scenes, Enzo meets Lina in a hotel, and her first words to him are, “How much time do you have?” which will no doubt ring a distant, sad bell in the memory of any serial philanderer.) To know “Il Commendatore” was to suffer anything from sorrow to violent death, but the man himself seemed immune to them. Only the death from muscular dystrophy at the age of 24 of his first son, Dino, seems to penetrate his monochrome mien or ever-present sunglasses.
If 2019’s Ford vs. Ferrari perhaps pandered too much to the audience in its laborious explanations and simplifications, this film commits the opposite offense. You really need to know the historical story in advance to have any idea who half of these characters are, with one throwaway subplot concerning Enzo’s attempt to beguile Fiat supremo Gianni Agnelli into funding his race efforts, and in another one, there is much fuss about who will drive the “small” Ferrari and who will drive the “fast” ones. What’s the reason for this? We never find out. (For the record, it was because there were multiple classes in which a car could win.)
Ostensibly, the key plot point of Ferrari is the 1957 Mille Miglia, the last time this open-road timed event would be run for anything other than rich guy vintage car amusement. Enzo is told that he needs to win the race to save his company, although the reasons seem flimsy. At the same time, his wife possesses a signed check that could bankrupt him. Mann folds, spindles, and mutilates history in the service of this all-or-nothing finale to the film, which is beautifully shot and composed until the CGI team is dragged back, presumably from an all-day event at the local dispensary, for another amateurish take at depicting catastrophe.
What happens next won’t surprise anyone who cherishes any of Mann’s previous work: We return to the microscopic examination of interpersonal relationships in the aftermath of tremendous violence. The most thoughtful criticisms of Miami Vice upon its release seized upon the fact that it was fundamentally a romance that just happened to involve .50-caliber rifles and high-speed smuggler boats. Similarly, Ferrari is really a film about adultery, faithlessness, sorrow, and betrayal that just happens to keep mowing down innocent children and cutting people in half, as if Friday the 13th had saved its most heartfelt efforts for periodic in-depth examinations of the recreational camping industry.
Perhaps the celebrated director can feel his audience losing their willingness to indulge him by the very end because the true dramatic climax of Ferrari is depicted via white text on a black screen before the credits. The reader will not be surprised to find out that it all works out just fine for Enzo himself despite the harm and misery inflicted on everyone around him.
This is not a great Michael Mann film. It stumbles on the easy stuff — some of the entirely feigned Italian accents are bad enough to make the dialogue incomprehensible, for example — and it often comes across as little more than the middle two hours of a six-hour Netflix series. Your reviewer had hoped Ferrari would depict midcentury motor racing with the same fanatical devotion to verisimilitude shown in Heat’s famous bank shootout. Instead, we get the same tired tropes of people changing gear to pass. The film’s obsessive focus on danger and death in racing also comes across as very modern because the competitors of the era didn’t think that way. It’s as if Downton Abbey had taken as its chief concern the lack of antibiotics in 1924.
Yet even the worst Michael Mann films are frequently a stylistic pleasure, as is the case here with a scene midway through that takes place in an opera house. Each character is transported back to the most important moments in their lives. And if husband and wife don’t see events of the past in quite the same way, that just adds to the pain of it.
No sooner does the scene pass, however, than we are once again presented with Enzo Ferrari the merciless, careless taskmaster. At a lunch with his drivers, he exhorts them to risk death rather than give up a corner to another competitor, using the phrase “sportsmen” in derogatory fashion to imply that perhaps not all of his “scuderia” have what it takes to do it. “You are all racers, and I have been. … [This is] our deadly passion, our terrible joy.” This phrase, “my terrible joys,” titles Ferrari’s autobiography. History shows us that Enzo kept a lion’s share of the joy for himself while allowing the resulting terrors to fall elsewhere. This is convincingly and deftly displayed in Ferrari, raising what would otherwise be a made-for-TV movie about extramarital affairs to the status of genuine art. Be prepared to continue your gracious indulgence of Michael Mann in his advanced years; he continues to earn it.
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Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.