It’s 1957. Enzo Ferarri, played by Adam Driver, gets up in the early morning, leaves the bed of Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), the woman he loves, caresses his 10-year-old son, gets into his car and drives away. Yet the creator of the famous, usually bright red, high-performance Ferrari automobiles, in an elegant suit and sunglasses, does not climb into a hot sports car; his vehicle is a dull gray-green four-door Peugeot 403, a middle-class family car.
But he’s late, and a close shot shows him shifting the gears hard, as if he’s racing – although instead of a slick and tidy stick on the floor, Ferrari’s modest Peugeot has a clunky gear-shift mounted on the steering column. It’s the first sign that Ferrari’s life may be cluttered with contradiction and pretention.
He goes to his official home, where he supposedly lives with his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), who berates him, pistol in hand, about what to tell people, while he is distracted by phone calls about prospective race drivers.
The movie Ferrari feels cluttered and unruly, but director Michael Mann may intend that as the chaotic picture of this man’s life. The ringing telephone interrupts his stormy moments with Laura; new race drivers arrive by train and bus. Then to the barbershop, where he’s teased about how Maserati, another race car legend, has a better car. After that, Ferrari visits the grave of his son with Laura who died of kidney disease some years ago. Then to church, a scene which the movie meshes with Ferrari overseeing a time trial at a racetrack, so that men in the pews are checking their stopwatches. And at that time trial, the gears jam and the hot red Ferrari flips into the air, cartwheels end over end and lands in a crumpled heap, the driver dead.
Get top headlines and KUNC reporting directly to your mailbox each week when you subscribe to In The NoCo.
On top of all this comes money troubles. Ferrari says that while Jaguar races cars to push consumer sales, Ferrari’s goal is racing – and the company is failing. He wants his wife – co-founder and co-owner – to give him control of her shares so he can make a deal, maybe with Ford to keep the Ferrari company afloat.
The movie Ferrari shows what’s beneath the man’s slicked-back hair, the constant sunglasses, the rich man’s life with mistress and wife, and racing the high-toned Formula One cars – a world where everyone appears well-dressed, like formal gardens. But also embedded in Ferrari’s life is the constant courting of spectacular fiery death. Michael Mann opens the film with a black and white sequence of a car race, probably in the late 1940s, which ends with a car flying out of control. Ferrari tells his drivers of “our deadly passion, our terrible joy” – and this before a big race that ends with a crash that also kills adults and children along the road.
The film Ferrari may not satisfy everyone, partly because it doesn’t give any answers. There’s no forceful story with a clear direction and resolution. The well-named Adam Driver plays Ferrari as distant and pre-occupied. But the movie has a sense of how a life contains a lot of ambiguity, moments that don’t fit together neatly. The loud and jarring images of racing from drivers’ point of view play against the muddled daily routines of a pretentious man. All through the vision of a now-80-year-old filmmaker who thinks about death.
To find showtimes for Ferrari,visit here.
