Ferrari (2023, Michael Mann) (Patreon)

47/100

Ali all over again, except here the exciting stretch comes at the end instead of at the beginning. Watching a struggle to fashion some sort of meaningful narrative/thematic arc from a celebrity's messy life just isn't my thing, and Ferrari's effort to make the Mille Miglia disaster merely the most horrific casualty of Enzo Ferrari's personality defects—part and parcel of the obsessive and quite literal drive that sees him try to effectively switch families when his secret mistress provides him with a replacement heir—never persuaded me, since the course itself was blatantly dangerous. Wasn't surprised to learn that just shy of two dozen spectators had been killed watching the race before the 1957 edition dramatized here, along with 22 additional drivers and navigators; closing titles note that Ferrari was cleared of responsibility (did the rich dude get away with homicidal negligence? that's up to you) but decline to mention that Italy finally came to its senses and permanently ended the Mille Miglia in that form, because people died almost literally every year that they ran it. You may argue that I'm placing too much emphasis on the race, but (a) I'm not the one who structured the movie with Mille Miglia '57 as its climactic third act, and (b) the question of whether a child will be "acknowledged," as opposed to loved and cared for (which Piero evidently always was), is of so little interest to me that even Penélope Cruz's perpetual mask of fury couldn't transform it into compelling melodrama. (Might've been more impressed by her performance had I seen/heard less hype; that made me anticipate more than one emotion. ) Neither Driver nor Woodley ever seems credible as an Italian, and it's quite hard for me to take the Pink Floyd-style wall that Ferrari builds for himself seriously when it's being demonstrated to us in moments like this:

FERRARI: I don't need another driver, Portago.
[roughly 30 seconds later, one of Ferrari's drivers dies in a spectacular wreck]
FERRARI: Portago. Call my office on Monday. 

That could be a ZAZ punchline, were the tone not so funereal. Mann also does stuff like introduce us, for no apparent reason, to the little doomed kids—not just standing by the road, eagerly awaiting the cars (which I think would've been fine), but sitting at the dinner table and then excitedly running out when they hear engines, which is tantamount to superimposing a big skull-and-crossbones image on their heads, because why are these the first spectators we're seeing before a vehicle reaches them? I didn't know in advance what happened, but at that point I knew very well that something was gonna happen, and it was gonna happen to at least one of those kids, and it was gonna be ugly. (Was not prepared for the actual ghastliness, which might have fucked me right up had I not been steeled for a disaster; I guess you could argue that Mann shows mercy by tipping us, but, to misquote Lloyd Dobler, I want to be fucked up!) Otherwise, that whole stretch is the film's saving (g)race, because Enzo and Laura and Lina never got even the tiniest bit under my skin. The mystery, to me, is not why I don't like Ferrari, but why I did like Public Enemies. Never reviewed that one, so I can't say how it escaped my general distaste for historical...we interrupt this sentence to note that I just this moment found that I in fact did sort of review Public Enemies, for something called the A.V. Club blog, which I had forgotten ever existed. Only found it because I thought to check Twitter and I linked to it there at the time; it's not on the site anymore—not at that address, anyway—but archive.org still had it. So there you go: I found something of keen interest to me in that film. Didn't in this one.