Enzo (Adam Driver) sending his drivers off on the race that will make or break him
Ferrari (2023)
In theaters and streaming on multiple platforms
Il Commendatore (in English, “the commander”) was a title of honor given to captains of industry in Mussolini’s Italy, including to auto magnate Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988).
Immediately after WWII, with Il Duce vilified, the government canceled all such honorifics.
And yet, in director Michael Mann’s galvanizing Ferrari, it’s the summer of 1957 and Enzo’s staff continues to call him Commandatore in a way that never feels servile.
A similar, but deeply ironic “respect” is shown to the magnate by the wolfish Italian press. Ever on the hunt for scandal, they speak the word Commandatore with a mocking, malicious undertone.
Pushing back, Enzo (played by Adam Driver) bestrides his intensely personal motor vehicle enterprise like a man not only worthy of success but born to rule his small but legendary manufacturing empire.
In his singular way of thinking, the company’s crown jewel is winning high-speed European car races. There, too, he wants to be an undeniable Commander.
Mann’s self-confident direction bristles with personality, showing a mastery and attack not unlike Enzo’s. Working from the late Troy Kennedy Martin’s balanced, deftly paced script, Mann gives one man’s industrial melodrama the loftiness and yearning of opera. Enzo’s tempestuous personal life is at center stage.
As racing car movies go, it’s decidedly more austere and brooding than Rush (2013), directed by Ron Howard and written by “The Crown”’s Peter Morgan. In different ways, I found both movies thrilling.
Here we open on the day Enzo’s late son Dino, who died of muscular dystrophy a year before at age 24, is being honored with a memorial mass. As Enzo enters the cathedral packed with friends and admirers, Mann inter-cuts the solemn moment with howling, snarling racing cars barreling around narrow, twisty courses.
In church, Enzo bows his head in grief, while we cut to the high-speed vehicles reflecting his deepest passion churning in hairpin turns, eating concrete like beasts. (The agile, lightning-fast editing is by Peter Scalia.)
Enzo was once a racing driver but modestly says he won “only a few” races. (In fact, he drove in 41 races and won 11.)
Instead, he’s remained dutifully dedicated to the family’s low to the ground, one-of-a-kind luxury automobiles, sold in deliberately small numbers to fabulously wealthy buyers.
Enzo’s business manager Giacomo (Giuseppe Bonifati) informs him that in the prior year they sold only 98 of their fine cars to a rarefied list of affluent customers.
At that rate, Giacomo mournfully informs Enzo, the company will soon go broke. “You spend more than you earn,” he bluntly informs Enzo, advising him to seek outside financing from an auto giant like Ford. Enzo balks. Ford would demand control, and he will never cede that.
These story elements could have become cheaply sensational in other hands. But Mann keeps the movie visually elegant and the mood stately and familial, grounded in a stability that’s teetering on dissolution.
The racing scenes are staged with hairpin precision yet ripple with fright. The sight of vehicles moving at such speeds never feels natural – crashing seems too scarily possible in every racing sequence.
What keeps the company’s finances rocky is Enzo’s love for racing. Maserati and Jaguar, two archrival auto manufacturers, enter races to give luster to their brands and thus sell more cars.
Enzo’s priorities are exactly the reverse. He laconically sells luxury cars in order to underwrite his obsession: high-speed racing. Ferrari has nobly competed in auto races for decades, and he wants the company’s reputation on Europe’s premier courses to remain intact.
He also brims with nativist joy. When the crowds yell out that his company represents the pride of Italy he doesn’t blink. He accepts the honor not only as won, but due.
Enzo (Adam Driver) and Laura (Penelope Cruz) relax in a happy marital moment
While Enzo may be a Commander, he’s not a master of his fate. He partnered 10 years earlier with his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), and she still holds the purse strings to the company they built together.
But now her concerns for the company and Enzo’s preoccupation with racing have vanished. She cares nothing for Enzo’s dreams.
She’s lapsed into perpetual mourning for Dino. He was to be Enzo’s heir, the next gatekeeper of the Ferrari name and fortune. Though lust hasn’t entirely disappeared from their volcanic marriage – there’s a steamy sex encounter they fall into helplessly, in the midst of an argument – nearly all the love between them has died.
Unknown to Laura, Enzo, for more than a decade, has been in a deeply emotional relationship with Lina (Shailene Woodley, in a nicely underplayed performance).
Not long after their affair began, Lina bore him a son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), who’s now near 12 years old and in both their minds has edgily begun to replace the deceased Dino.
Still, Lina wonders aloud to Enzo, Will Piero ever bear the Ferrari name? Since divorce in Italy is illegal, Enzo can make no such promise.
This is the bind Enzo finds himself in during the summer of 1957. To save his company and uphold his name, Ferrari’s five drivers must win the celebrated 1,000-mile race across Italy, Mille Miglia. Ferrari had won in the years 1948-1953 and again in 1956.
Victory must happen this year, Giacomo warns Enzo, or Ferrari’s lost prestige – and sales – will push the company into ruin.
Laura’s remaining hold over Enzo is financial. She doles out the money to all the company’s branches. He must play ball with his increasingly distant, suspicious wife – while keeping from her his unnamable secret. His living heir, borne by another woman, could take over the company he and Laura built.
Penelope Cruz as Laura Ferrari offers a shattering portrayal of a wife betrayed
This is loaded, highly emotional territory, with a story driven by ferocious, far from rational, schemers and dreamers. Mann has to give his actors license to erupt and shout, yet keep the explosions focused on what they can actually win or lose.
A hotly contested auto race, a venerable company, a blasted marriage and a cherished secret liaison are all on the line.
These story elements could have become cheaply sensational in other hands. But Mann keeps the movie visually elegant and the mood stately and familial, grounded in a stability that’s teetering on dissolution.
The racing scenes are staged with precision yet ripple with fright. The sight of vehicles moving at such speeds never feels natural – crashing seems too scarily possible at every twist.
Mann keeps these moments nerve-racking and absorbing in riveting, balanced proportions. While part of us wants these damned cars to slow down — such crazy velocities invite doom — we know the men behind the wheel wouldn’t dream of it.
In canny partnership with the director, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoots both shadowy interiors and screeching auto duels with a tight, unobtrusive finesse.
Driver plays the intensely private Enzo with a rectitude that blends dignity with a dark, unscrupulous wiliness. It’s a surprisingly compelling, push and pull performance.
I couldn’t respect Enzo’s excesses, but for all Laura’s vilification of the man, I never actually disliked him. With his close-cropped graying hair, rigidly stylish suits and ever-present dark glasses, which never actually conceal his expressions, Enzo seems a vain man guilty of overreach who’s hard to pin down or condemn.
Cruz as Laura gives a raging, demonic performance, utterly without glamor. Laura’s sorrow at the loss of her son and the imminent collapse of her marriage fills the actress’s face with sadness and fury.
Laura is becoming harder and more heartless as Enzo’s self-centered risk-taking and lies gut whatever affection they may have had for one another.
Her final scene where she makes a gallant concession and issues a pitiless demand gives her a strange moral victory. She sees to it that Enzo’s male privilege can’t win everywhere. This is one of the very best performances of the year.
Both actors get at the heartaches that torment men with outsize dreams and the women who try to love and help them. Bravo to Ferrari for showing us the contests where no winner’s flag can be flown.