Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023) (Patreon)

I'm not a huge fan of writer Dan Kois, but sometimes you've got to give the devil his due. In the first ten minutes of Ferrari, we hear the protagonist's mother (Daniela Piperno) utter a line that's become one of the catchphrases from Walk Hard, the comedy that takes all the cliches of the Hollywood biopic and holds them up for ridicule. "The wrong son died," she says, in all seriousness and with a spitting disgust. This is only the earliest indication that Ferrari is a film that's at war with itself, dead set on combining the kinetic thrills of a racing movie with the sort of overbaked great-man profile that often vacuums up Academy Awards. 

Focusing on the immediate postwar years, during which Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) and his wlfe / business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz) struggle to keep their automotive company afloat, Ferrari mostly consists of the buildup to the 1957 Mille Miglia disaster, when one of Ferrari's race cars went off track and killed nine roadside spectators, many of them children. This provides admirable focus, but it also reveals fissures in the overall makeup of the film. Mann is clearly borrowing from Marco Bellocchio, trying to reconceive the biopic as an Italian opera, with broad dramatic flourishes and a narrative structure borrowing liberally from Greek tragedy. Pride goeth before the fall, etc.

In a way, this leads to a kind of bait and switch, since the racing segments of Ferrari are by far the most compelling. Like the spectators of '57, we are almost morally upbraided for taking pleasure in the breakneck jostling of rich men's death machines. But perhaps more than this, Mann and screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin employ conspicuous foreshadowing, focusing on one of Ferrari's five drivers, Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone) to the exclusion of the others, and making sure we notice both him and Ferrari making bad, reckless decisions. (In particular, the pit crew wants to change a bald tire but De Portago refuses, leading to the blowout that sent his car flying into the crowd.) 

The problems with the business, and in Ferrari's personal life, all end up as tension builders leading to the tragedy, which makes for a tidy narrative. If the death of the Ferraris' first son is the motivation for Enzo to be the best at any cost, the Mille Miglia crash gives him the strength to leave his loveless marriage with Laura and marry his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) and recognize their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese). But placing this kind of neat narrative shell over actual events is erroneous and perhaps even tasteless. In opera, as in Greek tragedy, we are all hapless masters of our own fates, our flawed decisions coming back to haunt us. But in reality, shit just goes wrong sometimes. While auto racing is inherently dangerous, and one could argue that it's only a matter of time until such a tragedy occurs, Ferrari implies that Enzo himself flew too close to the sun, plummeting to earth and bringing a part of Italy down with him. This is just another side of the great-man theory of history, and perhaps my views are insufficiently pre-modern for me to buy in. Industrialists are not alone in shaping our world, despite what you may read on X (formerly Twitter), or observe with such grand gestures in Ferrari.