‘Ferrari’ Review: Michael Mann’s Return is a Propulsive, Poignant Look at a Legend’s Most Turbulent Period | Venice

Ferrari is Modena, and Modena is Ferrari. The small city in Northern Italy has a medieval centre with red roofs and a white clock tower you can see miles away. But its surroundings are practical, its factories carefully dotted along well-designed roads. It is Italy’s romance and Italy’s ingenuity.

Enzo Ferrari bottled that ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too’ approach to style and substance when he created the self-named car company in 1939. Its racing division was a shop window for kings and millionaires whose cash facilitated the real fun, the reason Enzo founded the company and became an icon of art and sport, not just business. (Who founded Lamborghini?) Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) reminds his business manager of his mission statement during a difficult meeting about the state of the company: “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”

But although Ferrari’s purpose and values inform Michael Mann’s fast-paced and surprisingly homely drama, the plot is more urgent. Ferrari is set in the months leading to the 1957 Mille Miglia endurance road race, in which Ferrari seeks to restore his company to its former racing glory and seal the courtship of the industrialist Agnelli family to secure its commercial future. Romance, ingenuity. 

Like most of Mann’s protagonists, Ferrari is unable to conceive of his personal life as anything other than a barrier to professional success. Inevitably, he suffers as the border between them thins. That’s even as his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) proves herself a better business manager, and personal investigator, than anyone on their payroll. Laura cannily uses her sizable role in the Ferrari business to protect her own interests and, in her own way, help guide the firm through its financial turbulence. This is especially important as Enzo seeks to build a new life in the countryside with Lina Lardi (Shaleine Woodley), his marriage with Laura ruined by the death of their 24-year-old son months beforehand. Cruz’s excellent performance is as measured as her character and, where necessary, histrionic, a crucial contrast to Driver’s sedateness. His occasionally frustrating deadness behind sunglasses against Cruz isn’t too different to his grounded work in House of Gucci. But some of Ferrari’s dramatic turns could have used a little more shouting.

For Michael Mann, repression is once again the name of the game. That Ferrari doubtless feels like a Mann film is credit to a director who seems to have lost almost none of his sharpness despite being out-of-practice, with growing gaps in which he must raise money for ambitious projects like this. Appropriately, he told Variety this month: “I don’t think about mortality. I’m busy.” He doesn’t defer to history or the source material, Brock Yates’s 1991 biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine. As in Ali and Public Enemies, archive footage is used nicely. And Mann’s trademark digital aesthetic works perhaps better than ever, aided by David Fincher collaborator Erik Messerschmidt, whose first cinematographer credit, on Mank, deservedly resulted in an Oscar.

Mann’s craft on Ferrari is, overall, a seamless update of his usual quirks after almost a decade away. The emotional beats of its story, which is gentler than we’ve typically seen from him and a compromise on the slick coldness of Blackhat, exhibit an interest in everyday life that has never really been part of Mann’s shtick. Style, yes, and plenty of substance.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2023 Venice Film Festival. NEON will release Ferrari on December 25.