Ferrari (2023)

Sometimes you walk away from a movie and it grows on you and you realize you don’t just like it, you love it. One of the reasons that I hate numeric ratings is that I find my feelings can change about a movie even if my thoughts about it don’t; I mean, those thoughts can shift too, but that seems more forgivable, somehow.

To quote a Twitter acquaintance, no sport works as well on film as auto racing. Like many of director Michael Mann’s films, Ferrari is about work – how people (usually men) go about their day to feed themselves and their families, and the contradictions of ethics and morality that comprise their daily comings and goings. In the case of Ferrari, the story – adapted by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin from the biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates – follows Adam Driver as the race car driver-turned-entrepreneur as he pursues the Mille Migla (“thousand mile”) open road endurance race to buoy the strained finances of his namesake car company; win the race, attract partnership investment to avoid bankruptcy. The competition for resources and attention between the manufacturing and racing divisions of Ferrari are one part of Enzo’s conflict with his wife and business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz), who resents him for the death of their son Dino as well as Enzo’s “whoring.” Meanwhile, at an estate he has maintained in secret, Enzo has a second family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), a young boy uncertain about his identity as he approaches his first communion. Ferrari is in large part a film about grief, responsibility, and old-world patriarchal moral duty.

The film opens with a grayscale portrayal of Driver as young Enzo in a racing car. Then, we see him awaken in bed beside Lina, check his watch, check on Piero, and head to his primary home. Laura says she will abide his whoring but that he is required to be home when she awakes, shooting the wall beside his head in their bedroom – Mann has established their relationship, the understanding between them, the festering grief and malignant passions. Next, they take separate cars to visit the mausoleum where Dino (Benedetto Benedettini; later Gabriel Noto at seven years old and Edoardo Beraldi at three years old in flashbacks) is interred. When the camera looks at Enzo while he speaks to his late son, the background shows that Enzo’s brother Dino, who died during World War I, shares the space. It is brilliant work by Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt to establish the trauma the family has experienced and the guilt that animates Enzo’s ambitious drive. The second World War is also invoked as a shared backdrop of the film – Enzo’s factory was destroyed then, and it’s when Piero was conceived.

Milan native Daniela Piperno portrays Enzo’s mother Adalgisa, who has a confrontational relationship with Laura – she is a sort of archetypical shuffling-and-muttering mother-in-law who does not believe Laura should question Enzo, and believes Enzo has a right to an heir, rubbing the death of one Dino into her face while continuing to bear the wounds of his namesake predecessor. Adalgisa and Laura arrive to the gravesite as Enzo is leaving, and many of the film’s emotional conflicts have been established.

Shortly thereafter we see all these characters at mass – Enzo and his team of strategists and engineers have brought stopwatches as they listen through a homily which uses engines as a metaphor (further establishing the connection between the municipality of Maranello, province of Modena, and the profits of Ferrari and rival Maserati) for the sounds of Ferrari’s and Maserati’s test drivers starting and finishing. We see a man die testing a Ferrari not long after, as Alfonso de Portago (Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone as the aristocrat motor sportsman) pursues a racing gig with Ferrari and becomes his replacement. The violence of the afternoon (this death is not the last we see on screen) is in slow motion – the drama coming from knowing that everyone present is witnessing a tragedy about which they can do nothing. The emotion is palpable as the driver’s girlfriend or wife watches on. Enzo wants to provide the woman a sort of widow’s pension. Laura takes exception to this, establishing her nature as a serious businesswoman, with all the coldness that implies; antipathy to the losses others suffer as part of their alignment and association with Ferrari, even as she manages her own abiding grief.

Some of the tensions at play here are highlighted in the film’s most emotional scene – a night at the opera where Linda sits in the balcony and can see down to Ferrari’s seats, where Laura has decided not to accompany Enzo. As the music soars the various characters are transported away to moments in their past. Laura and Adalgisa, both hearing the music from the estate, remember their sons. We see Enzo and Laura young and happily in love, with their boy playing in their bedroom. Adalgisa watches *her* Dino walk to board a train to join the fight in The Great War, walking through the fog never for her to see him living again. It is an intense series of images, showing love and laughter to establish how much has been lost. Enzo, while still strong and brilliant, is gray now. Laura, still beautiful, has circles around her eyes and moves through each day haunted and full of fury.

Another emotional highlight to establish emotional stakes and foreshadow coming tragedy takes place between Enzo and his racing team. After a later race where Enzo is uninspired by his team’s performance, he explains to his drivers (the aforementioned de Portago alongside Jack O’Connell as the English Peter Collins, Patrick Dempsey as the aging Italian Piero Taruffi, and Wyatt Carnell as the German Wolfgang von Trips) that he wants more from them – he wants them willing to risk their lives, to take the hard chances. “Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time,” he begins, before warning them they must accept the danger of this violent sport, their “deadly passion,” their “terrible joy.” They need to be willing to put their life on the line for victory. “You get into one of my cars, you get in to win.” The drivers must decide, Enzo says, if they are hungry competitors like the men at Maserati (Derek Hill as Jean Behra among them) or just gentlemen sportsmen. At the Mille Miglia, Enzo warns de Portago that his job is to just finish the race alive – it’s his first run, unlike the other men. There is a scene the night before the race where the drivers solemnly write and seal letters for their loved ones, in case they do not return. In the typical fashion of the young and hearty, de Portago heeds the one of these warnings that is a challenge rather than that which is intended to preserve him.

Class, culture, and labor figure interestingly into Ferrari. Enzo sells a car to the king of Jordan, he has a second house for his mistress, the municipality and the region depends in part on his decision making. By one metric, he carries them all with him, by another they are the tools of his success, laborers and peasants at the whims of an industrialist baron. He watches a race with his lead mechanic while everyone else has the day off. The idea of Enzo having or deserving an “heir” and the question of his obligations and responsibilities to his wife are wrapped up in culture and psychology but also in material reality – the rules are different, generally, for rich and poor, as are the concerns. Death happens around Enzo, some of which (like his older brother and eldest son) he cannot control, but others for which he is more, if not directly, responsible. He tells others he learned long ago to harden himself or find another line of work; the fickleness of death and destiny haunt him. Today, motor sports are much less dangerous because of advancements in technology and development of new rules; but this is a relative term – an F1 driver died in 2017.

Ferrari, like all car films, exists in part to explore the hubris of human experimentation with physics and mechanics. There’s hell to pay and it only takes one currency. The hubris, the pursuit, even manifests in a philosophical tension – Ferrari claims that he sells cars to race whereas Maserati races to sell cars; it is a symbiotic thing, not an either-or proposition, but there is a ratio here, a shifting scale of priority and value, and an inherent question of the purpose of capital and the process of capitalism. Is the acquisition of wealth and status a tool to pursue other things, or are other pursuits always means to the end of wealth? Where does contentment come from? What do the rich want? Men like Ferrari get to ask questions of society, of social structure, and of reality that the rest of us do not. Some of their comeuppance is in questions of reputation, which determine things like the stock value of a publicly traded company, the sale value of a sports car, or the stock and trade of the paparazzi that investigate, or are bribed and threatened by, a luxury car magnate because of personal and professional scandal.

Ferrari is a good biopic because it makes decisions that can be met as divisive. It stops short of hagiography – this is not a feelgood story about a noble man, though it is about a man’s greatness, how he pursues and deploys it. It is a portrait of a man at a crossroads; a former racer, an established businessman, trying to save his company. It is for the viewer to decide whether that was a prize worth the price paid for it. That company still exists – Scuderia Ferrari, the racing division, just made one of the highest profile transfers in motorsports history with seven-time Formula One championship winner Lewis Hamilton coming over from Mercedes[1] – but many challenges were ahead in the 1960s. The race Ferrari won in 1957 (his drivers finished in the first, second, and third place) no longer does; that was the last Mille Miglia that ever ran in that configuration because of the tragedy they were at the heart of simultaneous to their success. Epilogue-style text lets us know that Piero eventually took the name Ferrari and became Enzo’s heir; it does not mention that Ferrari had further financial troubles in the late 1960s, or that Enzo provoked several of his top engineers to leave and form their own company in the mid-1960s. This isn’t a failing of the movie, but it does end rather abruptly, perhaps stopping short altogether. Nonetheless, Ferrari strikes me as beautiful and emotional. Because of its subject matter, there is ample action, but there is a lot of drama, hot blood coursing through it, a heart beating as strongly and rapidly as an engine.

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[1] Hamilton will start at Ferrari in 2025. He will race for Mercedes in 2024

• adapted screenplay
• biopics
• motorsports
• racing