Ferrari review: Fleeting success
Review Overview
Cast
7Cars
7Consistency
3Ivan Radford | On 02, Mar 2024
Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz
Certificate: 15
“Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time.” That’s the fundamental principle behind racing, as Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) emphatically declares at his team early on in Ferrari. Michael Mann’s biopic of the motoring legend zeroes in on the summer of 1957, introducing us to the man at a crucial turning point in his life – and the make-or-break determination that fuels him is as true in life as it is on the track.
We meet Enzo as he is still grieving the loss of his son, Dino. He’s estranged from his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), and prefers to instead distract himself with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), and her son by Enzo, who is yet to be publicly acknowledged by him. The company, meanwhile, is on its last wheels, struggling to compete with the rising profile of Maserati, which leaves Enzo to hang his hopes on the Mille Miglia, a national endurance race that – for reasons we will soon discover – no longer takes place.
Michael Mann is no stranger to masculine figures of myth and authority, nor of stories that drift around themes such as fate and time. Enzo Ferrari, then, is a natural subject for the Heat and Miami Vice director, and the script – by Troy Kennedy Martin – dovetails the on-asphalt need to keep pressing forwards with the struggle of the father and husband to move on from death, to look forwards to the future, to overcome mortality.
It’s fitting that the film is at its most gripping when rocketing down straights and careening round corners: Mann’s digital camerawork makes for a slick and tense sequence of racing set pieces, with a grim sense of danger and collateral damage lurking behind each bend. At times, Mann pulls back to let us see just how flimsy these men and there toys are in the grand scheme of things.
It’s a shame, then, that the other parts of the machine don’t quite connect with these. Adam Driver is muted and poignant enough as the brooding, perma-sunglassed man to distract us from his Italian accent, while Penélope Cruz is fantastic as his fiery spouse, who is aware of being taken for a fool and has had enough.
But the film never manages to switch gears between the domestic melodrama and the driving smoothly enough for them feel like they’re part of the same film. We don’t spend enough time with Laura and Woodley’s underused Lina or the team of drivers putting themselves in harm’s way for the “terrible joy” of racing, which leaves both objects attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. The result is entertaining, but fleeting – and that, in a way, feels oddly appropriate.