Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’ Movie Captures the Drive and Tragedy of the Name behind the Prancing Horse

There are no 250 GTOs in Michael Mann’s new Ferrari movie. No Daytonas or Testarossas either. That’s not just because Ferrari—which stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari and

Penélope Cruz as his embattled wife, Laura—takes place almost exclusively in 1957, years before those cars were birthed. Mann strives to get inside the mind and soul of the legendary Enzo Ferrari, and beneath his showy surface. Ferrari cared little for the cars he sold to civilians; as he declares in the movie, other companies raced to help sell their cars, while he sold cars only to help him afford to keep racing.

The film resembles those iconic Ferraris: It’s meticulously designed and constructed, beautiful to look at, and often exhilarating to experience. But it also resembles Enzo himself, shaped partly by myth and hard to pry open, occasionally more slick and sleek than emotionally moving.

Mann’s starting point was Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, the 1991 biography written by longtime Car and Driver writer and editor Brock Yates. The book is filled with astute character analysis—Yates slams Ferrari’s callous attitude toward women and sex, critiques his reputation as an innovator and designer, but credits him as a force of nature and a dream builder. The power of Ferrari’s engines and the relentlessness of his competitive nature were an undeniable presence throughout the racing and automotive world for decades, but Yates also says easily seduced American journalists helped create the Ferrari persona that has “fascinated, charmed, and deluded Americans to this day.”

The book is also 400-plus pages of historical context, coverage of dozens of races, and details of mechanical aspects of Ferrari’s cars and the intricacies of his business negotiations, which for obvious reasons, didn’t all make it into the film. Speaking at a press conference, Mann, who tried for years to make this movie, said he wasn’t interested in a linear biopic. Troy Kennedy Martin’s screenplay captured Ferrari’s character by compressing the entire story into one turbulent year. The movie fudges the time frames of certain events, but given Ferrari’s penchant for self-mythologizing, it’s easy to imagine that he’d rather have a movie deemed a winner than one that’s wholly accurate.

The movie opens with black-and-white footage showing Enzo as a young racing champion, which is Mann’s first distortion—Yates paints Ferrari as a mediocre driver, one who admitted loving the cars too much to grind them to dust in an all-out effort to win.

Then we jump to 1957, where Mann establishes Ferrari in just a few sharply written and concise scenes, aided by the imposing Driver’s ability to shift gears from a soft smile to a sneering put-down. Ferrari starts out in a quiet and loving domestic scene . . . but with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), the woman with whom he had not only a decades-long affair but a son, Piero. We then see him greeting the public, conducting some business (while his underlings illuminate his paranoia and aggression engaging in frantic espionage against his rivals at Maserati), and flashing his arrogance in condescending remarks to doubters before finally heading home. There he’s confronted by an enraged Laura, his wife, who gets his attention by firing a gun in his general direction.

At 39, Driver is 20 years younger than Ferrari was then, but given Ferrari’s intensity and dynamism, it seems a natural fit. The actor said his deep research into his character revealed “[a] duck, calm on the surface but furiously paddling underneath.”

Mann captures how Ferrari played his drivers off one another to fuel their competitive drive—he tells one driver he’s getting the faster car but that his teammate will beat him anyway. The film occasionally veers into heavy-handed writing to reveal his unempathetic nature. When Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) comes to Ferrari, hoping to sign on with his racing team, Ferrari says “I don’t need another driver,” but when Eugenio Castellotti dies in a crash after being pressured by Ferrari to pursue a speed record (that part is true) mere moments later, Ferrari coldly tells de Portago, “Call my office.”

The foreshadowing involving de Portago and the infamous deadly accident at the 1957 Mille Miglia is equally unsubtle. But that climactic race is thrilling, shot with Mann’s typical rigor and vigor. While much of the driving was done by professionals, Mann got all the actors into cars and onto tracks. “We learn how to drive defensively or at least to respect others but when you’re racing you need a different mindset and you’re living closer to danger,” Leone said. “That experience was crucial to my character.”

Some shots may echo scenes from Rush and Ford v. Ferrari, but those were all track races while the Mille Miglia covered hundreds of miles through Italian towns and countryside. The long-shot scenes of cars racing through the mountains and valleys and close-ups on the streets of small towns rev your pulse the way the best James Bond or Jason Bourne chase scenes do.

But these drivers were not franchise action heroes, they were mere mortals, and Mann’s frenetic buildup to and slow-motion portrayal of the race’s horrific and tragic culmination captures both the thrill and the reckless foolishness of those races with a scene that you wish you could avoid but cannot avert your gaze from.

Ferrari was not at the crash, nor was he to blame, but the scene captures the full-speed-ahead, consequences-be-damned attitude of racing back then that Ferrari personified and brought into his daily life . . . and the film shows how those consequences came for Ferrari, like everyone else, both on and off the track.

Driver’s performance makes us empathize with Ferrari as a person more than Yates’s fact-based book did, but he also gives us see enough of the imperious bastard—whether dealing with the death of a driver or bullying the press—that when his mother says that in World War I, “the wrong son died” (which she really said), it’s both awful and understandable.

Racing and business are essential to the film, but the love triangle is central, although Mann downplays Ferrari’s complexity there. Laura refers to Enzo’s “whoring,” but the movie seems afraid to fully examine what Yates describes as almost compulsive womanizing, depicting him as a creature of his time and place but also as cruel and selfish.

The film largely plays him as a man who loves Lina and Piero but who—for reasons of love, loyalty, cultural norms, and business—cannot bring himself to leave his fraying marriage to Laura that was wrecked the previous year by the death of Enzo and Laura’s son, Dino. (One of the film’s most moving scenes comes when Enzo, the great man, finally confesses to Laura his guilt and feelings of helplessness at watching his son die; Driver, as in his emotional breakdown with Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story, is riveting when he falls apart.)

Yates barely sketches Laura in his book but portrays the continuing marriage as “more a détente than a union of love” and makes it seem like Ferrari respected her business acumen yet never treated her well as a wife. By contrast, Cruz, who visited Laura’s bedroom, met people who knew her, and read letters between husband and wife, argued that they stayed together because of a “real love, not a comfortable love” and a “great respect for each other.”

Whichever is more accurate, the screenplay gives Cruz a complicated character; her vulnerable but steely performance, which ranks with her best Spanish work for director Pedro Almodóvar, gives the film its emotional heft. At the press conference, Cruz praised Mann for creating a character who “represents so many women—in history but now too—who are invalidated by men and have to work from the shadows.”

Mann noted that he has known Piero Ferrari for two decades, which may explain why Ferrari’s success as a driver is overplayed and his womanizing is underplayed. It also possibly contributes to a final sweet moment between Enzo and Piero that feels tacked on and abrupt. It undercuts what would have been the better ending, a powerful, quiet conversation in which Laura both saves Enzo with her savvy and seeks to salvage her pride with a difficult request.

It’s easy to see Enzo Ferrari himself struggling with the same decision. The part of him that was so aware of his own image is likely to have chosen the ending Mann went with, but the ruthless side, which always sought the best possible result, would have cut it in favor of the cold, hard reality. While he buffered himself from it as best he could in his personal life, in racing, that reality was always unavoidable.

We saw Ferrari at the New York Film Festival; it opens on Christmas in theaters nationwide.