Flasz On Film

Michael Mann officially began trying to make his Enzo Ferrari biopic in 2000. Twenty-three years ago. To put it in context, it was a mere few years after his eponymous Heat and perhaps right after he secured the Best Director nomination for The Insider. Who knows, had he had his way – and I don’t know the details of how rocky the road was to get this movie off the ground two decades ago – maybe he would have walked away from directing Ali, for which Spike Lee was probably the better equipped director in the first place. Or maybe it would have traded places with Collateral or Miami Vice.  

As we all know, none of these things happened. Mann directed Ali, Collateral and Miami Vice while Ferrari was slowly gestating in the background with its revolving door of stars like Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman coming and going, script changes, and all sorts of other drama I can only imagine one day we’d see an extensive documentary about. Public Enemies happened. Blackhat happened. And Ferrari was still on a seesaw, swinging between states of being in production and being shelved.  

And yet it happened now, which should immediately inform anyone venturing to see this movie, who isn’t going in to see it because it is a Ferrari biopic or because it is an Adam Driver movie, or maybe because they have a thing for Penélope Cruz (which would be understandable, because she is an amazing actress and her performance in this movie is not an exception in this regard), but because it is a Michael Mann-directed Enzo Ferrari biopic, that Ferrari is a film Michael Mann cared about deeply. Therefore, it is important to recognize that it might just be a bit different from movies Mann directed in the past. It is a movie he made for himself, and it might be because he felt immense kinship with the man at the heart of the story he was trying to tell us.  

Now, I have been thinking about it quite a bit already and I’m reasonably sure when I say that Ferrari isn’t a movie to be dissected as a piece of semi-autobiographical projectionism. I don’t believe Mann sees himself wholly in Enzo Ferrari, but I do believe he understands in no small part what drove this man to do the things he did. Therefore, I’d stop short of trying to look at Enzo Ferrari’s life, his marital strife, and his brutal uphill battles to keep his company afloat and see it as symmetrical to Michael Mann’s journey through his filmmaking career. However, I still contend that Ferrari’s words that ended up in the film – roughly stating that other car companies race to sell more cars, while he sells cars to be able to race – must resonate with the filmmaker whose track record of making great action thrillers is likely a reflection of such a philosophy. Michael Mann doesn’t make the movies he makes to make money, but rather he makes money to make sure he can do the movies he wants to make. I can only imagine he looks at Enzo Ferrari and understands his tempestuous spirit and his competitive nature. Enzo didn’t care about money or clout. For him… the action was the juice.  

Again, it is crucial to carry this knowledge into the movie, or at least leave enough room for it to develop as you watch Ferrari, or as you leave the cinema ready to make up your mind about what you just saw. And that’s because Ferrari has very little to do with movies Michael Mann has made before. It’s not Thief. It’s not Heat. In fact, it is probably the closest tonally to Ali, which was a movie perhaps a bit too long for its own good and not punchy enough (pardon the pun) to spar with Mann’s greatest works without extra padding and a safeword. And in reality, Ferrari is a movie about the kind of determination it took to make Thief, Heat and The Insider.  

Therefore, the juice and the action are not present here, even though Ferrari is technically set around the time in 1957 shortly after Enzo’s son died and leading up to the 1957 Mille Miglia race that saw Ferrari triumph over their competitors like Maserati, thus securing the company’s future. Ferrari isn’t a film about racing, but about a man obsessed with racing, who effectively hid from his life’s many woes under the bonnet of cars he worked on and on the racing track he used to test if his cars are fast enough, and if his drivers are ferocious enough to meet his standards. Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari truly embodies the torn and ambiguous nature of the character, which doesn’t necessarily protrude from the script. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if the nuance of his performance came from Michael Mann directly, perhaps because the director innately knew what it feels like to bury yourself in work to seek escape from reality, and to commit yourself wholly to the pursuit of adrenaline. To seeking that juice.  

Problem is, Ferrari as a film isn’t about that juice, but rather about the idea of chasing after it. Or better yet, it is a film about a memory of once having chased the juice and maybe a part of a process to understand that there comes a time in every man’s life when chasing after that juice is no longer a healthy thing to do. Therefore, as much as it occasionally succeeds in reminding us what it used to be like to hold on for dear life while watching Tom Cruise go to a night club in Collateral, to hang on James Caan’s shoulder as he was breaking into safes, or watching Al Pacino’s six as he was chasing after Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer on the streets of LA in probably one of the most iconic action scenes in the history of Hollywood, Ferrari just doesn’t have the stamina to sustain those energy levels. And Michael Mann knows that. I think he understands he’s no longer the same Michael Mann who put together those unquestionable masterpieces of action filmmaking and he clearly set out to make a film that comments on this process from the sidelines.  

But the heart wants what the heart wants and as a result, Ferrari comes across as extremely uneven. It veers between moments of high-octane thrills, protracted chamber dramas resting on slapped-on Italian accents and having to do justice to the source material so as to satisfy the requirements of a biopic. Consequently, it just isn’t a great movie. It’s too dense, too haphazard, too undecided. In fact, the only way I can find a positive angle for me to assume is by mapping this semi-autobiographical interpretation over top of the movie, because Ferrari’s life as depicted in the story is not necessarily intriguing enough. Sadly, it’s still just a biopic hoping to thrive on whatever juice Mann had left in him… which may have gone out of date because it just doesn’t hit the same.  

In a way, this realization contributes to the overall commentary and perhaps as time goes on, we’ll be able to use Ferrari as a decoding key to understand this filmmaker a bit better. It is clear to me that Mann and Ferrari see eye to eye and that he had a strong personal conviction to persist in trying to make this movie for as long as he did, but it just doesn’t land the way it perhaps would have if we had seen this movie in 2003.  

I wonder if, had Ferrari seen the light of day two decades ago, I’d have the same complaints. Would the theatrics of appended accents and the chamber dramas of Enzo’s infidelity move me more profoundly? Would the choice between loyalty to his wife (Cruz) and his mistress (Shailene Woodley) come across as more operatic? Would it hit harder to see him struggle with wanting to acknowledge his son while the memory of his other son’s death was still fresh? Put simply, is there a better movie in here that could have been achieved if the filmmaker in charge was twenty years younger? 

I tend to believe that. Octogenarians rarely make great movies (vide Napoleon), unless they are Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon). I honestly think that Ferrari was a great movie for Mann to direct when he was sixty, right at the time when reflecting on his legacy while wanting to keep the engine running still made a lot of sense. Now, he’s just a guy on a bench reminiscing about making great movies once. And Ferrari reflects that… which in its own way invites a truly tragic realization that those titans of Hollywood are never immortal. And that action juice has a use-by date.