The most successful biopics tend to zero in on a pivotal era of their subject’s lives rather than trying to squeeze years or decades into a couple of hours’ screen time. That’s the approach director Michael Mann takes in Ferrari, a portrait of the daredevil race car driver turned manufacturer set mostly in 1957, when Enzo Ferrari was about 60.
Adam Driver was not yet 40 when the film was shot on location in Italy last year, but with some artificial gray in his hair and a little paunch around his middle, he convincingly embodies a proud, very public man who is, as the film opens, at risk of losing both his marriage and his business. His wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), who owns a significant stake in the company, has had it with his philandering—she fires a pistol at him in an early scene, and that’s before she learns he has a son by longtime mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), which seems to be an open secret among Enzo’s associates. Both Laura and Enzo are still mourning their son, Alfredo, who was only 24 when he died of an illness the previous year. Adding to their burdens is the fact Jaguar is lapping Ferrari in the pricey sports car market. The company Enzo has spent his life building is going broke.
His only chance to dig himself out is to find a financial partner—and to burnish the Ferrari brand by having one of his cars win the 1957 Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile endurance race across the Italian countryside. Certainly Mann, an auteur with expensive tastes and not the slightest interest in superheroes, can probably relate to Enzo’s fear that the industry to which he’s given his life has passed him by. Knowing nothing of race car history beyond what Ferrari (and 2019’s Ford v. Ferrari) taught me, I’ll just say that we learn why 1957 was the last year the Mille Miglia was held. The screenplay is by Troy Kennedy Martin, working from Brock Yates’ biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine.
Mann, of course, knows his way around a car chase, and the racing sequences have a visceral sense of threat to them. It won’t surprise anyone Mann loves fast and absurdly impractical Italian cars. He featured them prominently on Miami Vice, the flashy NBC cop show he oversaw almost 40 years ago, and which arguably remains the project for which he’s best known, though he’s gone on to make masterpieces of the crime genre like Heat and Collateral and period epics like The Last of the Mohicans. But it’s been a long time since we had a new Mann movie—Blackhat, his initially dismissed but reclaimed by Film Twitter cyberthriller, was released (albeit just barely) nine years ago. That film was too muddled to be worth the effort for anyone who’s not a Mann stan(n) like me, but it was atmospheric and propulsive.
Ferrari isn’t, at least not to the same degree. It’s possible we could be watching a great filmmaker’s metabolism throttle back a little, the way some observers lamented that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t have the punk-rock pace of its now 81-year-old creator’s earlier work. Mann is 80, but Ferrari doesn’t demand the kind of sober reflection that Killers did. So it’s disappointing that this long-in-the-works Mann dream project doesn’t crackle with the kind of formal innovation that made the only other biopic on his resume—2001’s Ali, with Will Smith as the inspiring boxer—such a rush.
Mann remains attuned to sensual pleasures—even the plums Enzo picks while visiting Lina’s house seem too succulent and colorful ever to have existed, and the cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt makes the most of the genuine Modena, Italy, locations Mann insisted upon. But this feels like a movie that Ron Howard or F. Gary Gray or any number of reliably anonymous studio filmmakers could have made—not a project that has lived in the imagination of a great American artist for more than 20 years. There’s nothing wrong with a nice Toyota Camry, except when you’re expecting, you know, a Ferrari.
Ferrari opens at area theaters on Christmas Day, Dec. 25.