There is a brilliant scene early into Michael Mann’s Ferrari where we witness two religions being threaded into one. The film’s legendary namesake engineer, ex-racer, and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari (played by a stern-eyebrowed Adam Driver), sits in a church. The priest is declaring that if Jesus had been born two thousand years later, he would not have been a carpenter, but an engineer of metal. Apparently, Jesus’ work was to “speed us through the world”.
With increasing inertia, Mann ricochets us between the church and a racetrack somewhere not too distant, where the roar of a Ferrari’s power unit slices through the air as it speeds through a chicane.
Ferrari is a name, a brand, an iconic eye-popping red. It is also, as this euphorically whiplash-inducing scene suggests, a religion – a philosophy of speed, and hence one of life and death. Based on the biography written by Brock Yates, Mann’s 20-years-in-the-making biopic tells the story of the automobile engineer described by the Italian press as “Saturn devouring his own sons”, such was the trail of carnage his cars wrought in the pursuit of victory.
Yet while this tale of speed and mortality builds a fascinating assemblage of man, God, and machine, Ferrari regrettably splinters into two films. One is a genuinely hold-your-breath racing movie that viscerally captures all of motorsport’s inherently cinematic, spellbinding qualities. The second is a disappointingly muted interpersonal drama that fails to sufficiently translate Ferrari’s enduringly seductive mythology: the spiritual ways it possesses the people who choose to risk lives (including those of others) for that extra tenth of a second quicker across the finish line, in that legendary red car.
It’s admittedly odd to say that’s what Mann’s Ferrari inevitably fails to do, since that very premise appears to be the reason why the film exists in the first place: to tell the dark history of motorsport’s human cost through one man’s pursuit of greatness, thick with ghosts, strewn with charred metal and collateral damage. But Ferrari’s curiously subdued biopic can’t help but falter in comparison to its utterly excellent racing scenes. Driver’s interpretation of revered/reviled Enzo Ferrari is not bad, yet it’s puzzlingly unsure of itself: wavering between Oppenheimer-esque tortured genius and sociopathically mercenary sports team manager, he isn’t focused enough to summon enough ego, charisma, or narcissism to become the kind of man you’d follow onto treacherous roads even under threat of death.
On the contrary, Ferrari utterly transforms whenever we go racing. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt pins us to the front hubcap of those cars as they hurtle through the landscape, and our eye level is locked at such brutal and exhilarating proximity to the eternally insane demands of motorsport that the decades between 1950s races like the Mille Miglia and today’s comparatively rocketship-esque Formula 1 collapse into singularity. Its much-discussed, explicitly gory crash scenes arrive with a horrifically physical momentum, stunning the breath from your body with your forced recruitment into the cruel spectacle of motorsport, one that continues to morbidly characterise a lot of modern interest to this day.
Calling on his drivers to brake later, force rival drivers off the racing line, and take their lives ever closer to the point of no return, Enzo says of the racecars: “Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same point in time. You have to ask yourself: am I a sportsman, or a competitor?” Ferrari makes you wish its human story was told with a similar ruthlessness, bringing the fanaticism off-track, too. The church of speed demands more compelling demons and glory-seekers to tell its story.
Ferrari premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31. It hits UK cinemas on Boxing Day.
