Directed by Michael Mann. Written by Troy Kennedy Martin
This review is about Adam Driver.
Michael Mann’s Ferrari features steely and steelbound ambition, white-knuckled racing, scorching intensity, uncompromising men, deadly tragedy and sacrifice by those who orbit it. Thrilling on its own, but it’s as Enzo Ferrari, co-founder of the eponymous racing car company, that Adam Driver towers above it all.
He’s a monolith as Ferrari, whose ego rivals the heel of Italy in size. To boot, Ferrari’s an adulterer whose wife is right to shoot warning shots at his head. Without humanity beneath to tether it all, it’s borderline villainy. Driver has to reveal that humanity even as he, in an electric monologue, demands his drivers be ready to die for the racing line. He has to unearth the ghosts that will haunt this man forever. He has to render himself soft flesh for the lashes of his exasperated wife and co-founder Laura (Penelope Cruz), who eviscerates him with good reason, the egotist and adulterer he is. Finally, as it is the central pursuit of Ferrari, he has to provide the broad shoulders upon which an empire is built. He does it all.
Driver draws tears at the mausoleum holding his dead son’s remains, crying onto the marble altar as memories of everyone he’s lost swims before him. At his home, he engages in a spousal fight whose vitriol rivals that scene from Marriage Story. At his lovenest, he remakes himself in the love he has for his mistress and their son, emerging as a tender man, unrecognizable.
With the inherent drama in his face, Driver can summon all this with the slightest of twitches, the setting of a lip, the hold of a gaze. The aforementioned scenes make him a person, make him Enzo, but it’s as Ferrari, unassailable racing royalty, that Driver’s performance truly shines, providing the current off which sparks fly in these more emotional scenes.
Driver’s broad and angular face feels carved from the Italian marble that adorns Ferrari, a study in harsh aesthetics. Set in pensive folds or agitated focus, it remains fixed in contrast to the fluid-looking and frenetic machines that race around under his watchful eye. You sense that Ferrari, like the car that bears his name, races along a fine line wherefrom deviation can be fatal.
Ferrari is at its core about uncompromising vision, and for that to convey, it’s as the company’s public-facing personality he must succeed. Here, he moves with a purpose, and states his points with a matter-of-factness that suggests inevitability. What he decides will be done. No one takes the wheel from him.
Many biopics want to portray the man behind the myth, and Ferrari isn’t oblivious to that, but much of it takes place away from privacy. At the office, at the track, in face of the public, Driver delivers a piece of mythmaking.
Mikkel Frederiksen 