This image released by Neon shows Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari in a scene from “Ferrari.” Lorenzo Sisti/Leon via AP
Ferrari starts with some ancient history: archival footage of Enzo Ferrari racing cars as a young man in the 1920s, just a few decades into the automobile age, long before he founded his eponymous automobile company. Watching him zoom around the track in grainy black and white is thrilling. But, wait a minute – how are we cutting into these closeups? Cameras were much too large in 1924 to strap to the side of a race car. And hold on – that’s not Enzo. It’s that most Italian of non-Italian movie stars, Adam Driver.
Michael Mann, the celebrated director of several excellent 1990s films (“Last of the Mohicans,” “Heat” and “The Insider”), starts his latest effort on this fraudulent note, and though Ferrari is an ambitious and well-crafted film, it’s almost over before the director finds a more authentic key. Enzo was one of the 20th century’s most competitive businessmen, and the film focuses on the most intense year of his life, leading up to the infamous Mille Miglia of 1957, the last edition of the 1,000-mile tear from Brescia to Roma and back that saw Ferrari battle Maserati each year for engineering supremacy. Although it explores some major psychological terrain, from marital discord to suffocating ambition to devastating loss, Ferrari barely scratches the surface of the man.
Let’s start with the elefante in the room: Driver is a fantastic actor, with gangly good looks and a dark, brooding gaze, but his predilection for Italian parts is a little odd. First he was Maurizio Gucci, now Ferrari – who’s next, Mussolini? Driver fares a bit better with the dialect than he did in House of Gucci, but it’s still needlessly distracting. He superbly negotiates Enzo’s psychological journey, but any emotional subtleties get flattened by his heavy tongue.
Even so, the fault belongs to the vehicle, not the Driver. The screenplay, adapted from Brock Yates’ biography, “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine,” is a lemon. (Troy Kenney Martin, who died in 2009, is credited with the screenplay.) The first 100 minutes meander aimlessly through Enzo’s business struggles, his tempestuous marriage with Laura (Penelope Cruz), his despair at losing his eldest son to muscular dystrophy in 1956, and his guilt about keeping his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), and their young son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), a secret. It’s Marriage Italian Style without laughs or sex appeal.
Woodley, alas, is woefully miscast. Her accent rarely veers out of Southern California, though she occasionally (and briefly, thankfully) channels Livia Soprano for a syllable or two. More problematic is her apparent boredom with the whole project, but who can blame her? The script doesn’t give her much to do but wait around. Laura is a far more interesting part – she supplies the movie’s most surprising twists – and Cruz throws the pedal to the metal. She’s phenomenal, effortlessly cycling between stupefied dejection, devious machination and unhinged anger. The Spanish actor is also the closest thing Ferrari has to an actual Italian; when she’s on camera, we seem to be watching some other, more authentic and much better movie.
Prowling on the margins of this soap opera are some even more ferocious and fascinating animals: the sexy, sinuous vintage Ferraris, Maseratis, Porsches and Jaguars the filmmakers have miraculously assembled for the production, augmented with re-creations and computer-generated models. At moments, the CGI is uneven – particularly in the crash scenes – but mostly it’s a joy to watch these beauties hug the curves and speed through the finish line.
It takes forever to get there, but we finally do arrive at the movie the trailers promised: the thrilling, terrifying tale of the final Mille Miglia. The year before, Ferrari suffered a catastrophic loss to his archrival, Maserati; this year, it’s not just his pride on the line – the future of his entire company is at stake.
Speeding along through stunning Italian scenery with a clutch of handsome drivers (Gabriel Leone as Alfonso de Portago, Patrick Dempsey as Pero Taruffi and Jack O’Connell as Peter Collins) is exciting indeed. Along the last stretch, just before disaster strikes, we fly with Portago down an endless straightaway lined with ancient cypresses. It’s a glimpse of automotive and cinematic ecstasy. This is the ride the movie should have taken all along.
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