A Modest Proposal: Make the Cars Different Colors in 'Ferrari'

Michael Mann's Dad-movie epic misses a few layups.

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Neon

A lot of critics like to talk about getting our Neon screener packages like it’s the best day of the year, and it’s hard to deny that it’s pretty great. Every year you get a nice little sleeve of 10 or so DVDs, most of which are usually solid movies (Neon is sort of an even cooler, more indie A24) and at least one or two of which have yet to hit theaters. It makes you think Oooh, I’m so special! which is obviously the point of screener DVDs and For Your Consideration campaigns in general.

Like I said, great. But if you’re sensing that this is probably just a long preface for something I’m going to bitch about, your intution is correct. One drawback of a lot of these not-commercial-quality DVD screeners, and of this batch in particular, is that the movies don’t have subtitles. That’s a problem for most DVD audio, which is wildly uneven on its best day (yes I have a fancy soundbar, it doesn’t help that much, let’s not get into a whole thing over it), but especially so during a movie like Ferrari, which is half loud car engines and half non-Italian actors a-speaking inna their-a best-a molto Italiano accenti! Belissimo, belliiiiiiisssimo. (*touches thumbs to forefingers, grabs crotch*)

Which is to say that I had to watch Ferrari twice, the second time at window-rattling volumes with the family out of the house and my wife not in bed next to me (“Can you turn that down a few notches?” being our favorite bit of dirty talk), and even then I only caught about 85% of the dialogue. Of course, this is a movie about racecars from Heat director Michael Mann, not My Dinner with André, so probably missing a few lines of garbled dialogue here and there isn’t a big deal. Anyway, that’s my preface.

The trouble with Ferrari is that it’s really two movies competing with each other — one a very traditional drama about the Great Man Enzo Ferrari and his passions and complicated relationships, and another, more interesting one about how early racecar drivers were basically fuckboi cannon fodder for domineering, single-minded horsepower freaks. I find myself more intrigued by the second take, though either could’ve worked, but in being torn between both it doesn’t quite end up with either.

Ferrari opens with Enzo Ferrari, played by everyone’s favorite adopted Italian, Adam Driver, who is somewhat inconceivably actually a WASP from Indiana, sneaking out of a woman’s house early one morning. Soon we learn that this woman is actually his mistress, Lina Lardi, played by Shailene Woodley, who seems to have been cast mainly to make everyone else involved seem 60% more Italian (Shailene Woodley makes Adam Driver look like Marcello Mastroianni).

After pushing it down the driveway before starting the engine, Enzo pilots his little coupe around the sun-drenched hills of Emiglia-Romagna in the manner we’ve come to expect of Italian gentlemen post-Fellini — sunglasses affixed, stiff upper mouth betraying just the hint of a smirk, the commendatori pleased by-a his-a bellissimi auto-machina. Enzo do a leeto wave when he passa the adoring people of Modena, and eventually arrives back at his real house where his wife, Laura (LAU-rah), played by Penelope Cruz, berates him over his infidelity (“I don’t care who you fuck, the deal was you get back before the housekeepers arrive in the morning!”). She gets so mad she shoots off a pistol into the wall next to him. Driver’s semi-stiff recoil as the squib goes off behind him cements his status as one of our finest actors; so effortlessly iconic I can picture every movement as I type this.

“What happened?” asks a valet out in the hallway.

“Oh, the donna shoota her-a gun atta di commendatori,” answers a maid matter-of-factly, just another colorful day in the old country.

This sets up story one, about the complicated personal life of Enzo Ferrari, who owns a famous car company 50-50 with his wife, has a dead son named after a dead older brother, and a live child with a mistress who enjoys his father’s love but not his family name. Enzo’s mother is there too, the hardest person in the film to understand. I did catch her telling a friend “the wrong son died!”, which is either an unironic accidentally retelling of a joke from Walk Hard, or some kind of power move by Michael Mann to prove that he can stick a Walk Hard reference into his sumptuous Italian melodrama. (I find myself intrigued by the mystery of whether Michael Mann has seen Walk Hard).

Eventually Enzo gets out of the house and down to the racetrack to begin story two of Ferrari. Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (adapting from Brock Yates’ book) sets up that one with the film’s first racing footage, a speed trial that ends with the driver missing a gear and getting ejected from his tiny wheeled rocket going hundreds of miles an hour, flying hundreds of feet in the air and dying gruesomely while his fiancee looks on. Luckily there’s already another daredevil waiting in the wings to replace the dead one, and he’s standing right on the tarmac next to Enzo trying to get his attention — Alfonso De Portago, played nearly mute by the handsome Gabriel Leone.

So that’s our two stories. The traditional biopic part is as elegant and watchable as you’d expect from a Michael Mann movie with an all-star cast, but it’s remedial to the point of accidentally maybe echoing a parody of the genre released 16 years ago. The story of car racing as an inherently psychopathic pursuit is intriguing, but many of its textures and nuance remain unexplored beyond the pitch. Why do these men care so much about speed that they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of countless aristocratic gloryboys for it?

If the trouble with storyline one is that it’s a little too Hollywood, the trouble with storyline two is that it maybe isn’t Hollywood enough. Ford V. Ferrari gave us multiple colorful characters, from the prickly Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to the bluff Carol Shelby (Matt Damon) to the tyrrannical, pathetic failson Henry Ford II, played unforgettably by the brilliant Tracy Letts (the scene where Ford breaks into tears after a terrifying ride-along is perfect on just about every level that a scene could be). Michael Mann doesn’t have Ford V. Ferrari director James Mangold’s Spielbergian, pop-commercial instincts, which is oftentimes to his credit, but it works against him in Ferrari.

The drivers in Ferrari, by contrast, all look fantastic, from Patrick Dempsey’s stately silver fox hairdo as Piero Taruffi to Jack O’Connell in Peter Connell’s glorious ascot, but never do we learn much about them or what makes them special as drivers. (That the drivers are somewhat expendable and easily replaced is surely part of the point, but knowing that doesn’t make it exciting).

The climactic race of the film is the 1957 Mille Miglia, pitting Scuderia Ferrari against their main contenders to the crown, Team Maserati. Car racing is up there with baseball in terms of sports that I find mostly dull in real life yet impossibly exciting almost every time they’re depicted in film, and yet the drama of the Mille Miglia doesn’t quite come off. If I could be permitted an overly simple explanation for this, the problem is that you can’t tell the damned cars apart.

Yes, racecars do tend to have similar bodystyles, and a faithful movie depiction like this probably couldn’t just going changing the bodies of iconic racecars; that would be weird. …But did they all have to be the same color? It seems they probably were all the same color in the real race (based on the photographic evidence that isn’t in black and white), but I think slightly differently-colored racecars for the rival team is a creative liberty we audience members could easily accept. Or hey, find some other stylization trick or artistic solution! Give us some of that movie magic!

Suffice it to say, there are times when storytelling logic should trump literal reality, and one of those times is when you’re staging a climactic clash between rival car companies. If we just have to wait for an announcer or a cutaway shot to explain to us which team’s car we just watched crash, why not just read the Wikipedia page?

In a different movie this might not have been as big a deal, but in Ferrari this failure of imagination feels emblematic of larger inability to commit to being a particular kind of movie. It comes off as a not-quite-as-good version of a few different ones we’ve already seen, splitting the difference between two potential takes on the material and not getting the best version of either.