Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is the founder of the automotives company, Ferrari, in 1957. While some car manufacturers use racing cars to further the sale of their commercial vehicles, Ferrari is all about producing the fastest cars for racing as an absolute. Enzo is a no-nonsense elitist, and when he demands a detail of his workers, they say, “yes, sir!” and get right onto it. But Ferrari is facing financial hardship, and with Enzo’s wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) owning an equal share in the company, Enzo will have to keep her aligned, while navigating and enhancing perceptions that Ferrari is, or should be, the pride of Italy; all while preparing for the next upcoming race, the Millie Miglia. Meanwhile, Laura has become increasingly disgruntled by Enzo’s extramarital affairs, and may’ve just discovered his most secret one of all – a relationship he shares with Lina (Shailene Woodley), who lives in the mountains with her illegitimate son.
This is an old school movie, slow and content doing one thing at a time. It actually shares a similar structure to Rustin – a biopic I just placed in my top 10 favourite movies of 2023 – in that it sets up the main character’s ambition, to win a crucial tournament for funding in this case, and then is preoccupied by the lead’s personal life, and the stressors of that. The only major difference is that within the edit of Rustin, and its dialogue, I found more pizzazz, more zhuzh 😅 I suppose what I could say is that Ferrari is a competent traditional biopic, but nothing out of the ordinary. Micheal Mann directs Ferrari, after serving as an executive producer on James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari five years prior.
And hot on the heels of House of Gucci, I bet Adam Driver saw this offer come across his desk and wondered if tackling another Italian accent would be the smart choice again. But you’re not going to give up the opportunity to play this determined, driven, and larger-than-life figure, even if myself in the audience got lost looking at this character’s body type, as Driver’s thin neck doesn’t match the paunch also presented with Enzo Ferrari. Just like his previous Italian-centric movie, I think Adam Driver gives an uneven performance – his accent is not consistent, and either actor or editor at times should’ve gone for another take. Apart from that, Driver can be supremely solid, as we’ve come to expect, but since I’ve just mentioned costuming and accent, that’s two distractions you don’t want to face when trying to lose yourself in a story. On the other hand, Penélope Cruz is completely vicious, and you really believe that this is her company to defend, as is her character’s plight, which is all you ask of an actress to do. I didn’t see the recent Spanish movie, Parallel Mothers, where Cruz was nominated for many acting awards, but it seems like she is atop of her game and keeping there – the highlight of Ferrari for me 👍 For a movie that is nearly always about Enzo, the movie can cut back to Laura as infrequently as something like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did for Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, but I would always be alerted to see what Mrs. Ferrari was going to do next. The scene where Laura screams that she holds Enzo responsible for their son’s death could be the movie’s most elevated moment, but the two actors are never shown in the same shot together, and it’s a real missed opportunity – if I’m going to be third-wheeling an explosive argument, then I want it to strive for realism. This felt staged, and perhaps it was due to production limitations, but a huge advantage of Marriage Story, the best Adam Driver movie to date, was that the arguments felt palpable. Ferrari pales in comparison dramatically.
Truthfully, I had an intrusive thought at seeing a random family share dinner together during the Millie Miglia, wondering what it would be like if a movie like this randomly turned into another genre; say, with a gnarly zombie outbreak or something like that 😅 Ten minutes later there was a car flying through the air, taking out an entire crowd of people in absolute carnage! For those who knew the history behind this movie, were surely expected it, but I wasn’t, and if I ever thought I was omnipotent I might say I conjured some gruesome ‘Walking Dead graphics into existence! Ferrari had contained some CGI of car crashes before this that weren’t all that believable, but the shock of this smash was enough to scoop my attention, and with a layer of disbelief for the better. It just goes to show me how car racing is such a horrible spectator sport – there’s no distance away from the track that promises safety I reckon, and this movie, following on from Gran Turismo last year, about another true and tragic racing incident, only affirms my concerns. Give me tickets to the ping pong any day of the week, and I’ll risk an errand plastic ball to the neck as the only consequences 😄 Yeah, I’m not really a ‘cars guy’, so I’m probably not even this movie’s premier audience anyway. Commiserations to all the relatives of this horrible incident on the Italian roads in 1957.
Ferrari, as a movie, wraps up pretty quick from there. Ferrari is cleared of any wrongdoing on behalf of the crash, and assumes its funding. Whilst Ferrari may be a movie I’d watch again, it’s nothing special to me, and it’s one of those rare experiences where I haven’t had a lot to say about it, since I found it fairly middle-of-the-road (pardon the pun), and they’re always the hardest movies to generate any enthusiasm for, one way or the other. I will end by saying how thrilled I was to see Jack O’Connell getting a gig again on the big screen, albeit too small – I will always remember Cook from my high-school days watching Skins, and he seems to be getting by mostly on British TV again these days. Patrick Dempsey too – if Neve Campbell is dragged back into the Scream franchise, then I really hope he’s right behind her.
3.0
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