Michael Mann returns to filmmaking with a biographical adaptation of one of the most difficult periods in the life of Enzo Ferrari and his car company.
ferrari this is a funeral movie. This is a film populated by bodies living on the verge of death and decay, surrounded by ghosts. Ghosts behind and ghosts ahead. It’s obvious from the moment Laura Ferrari (Penelope Cruz) goes to the grave of his son, who died last year, in 1956. In front of her is the gravestone of Alfredo Dino Ferrari, the son who died at the age of just 24 due to a degenerative disease. But behind him is another tombstone, another Alfredo Dino, brother of Enzo Ferrari from Adam Driverwho also died very young during World War I.
Ghosts are everywhere, a warning and an omen that wedged into the midst of the limbic characters that inhabit the work that Michael Mann is returning to direct after nearly a decade – most recently with the underrated Blackhat. Ghosts that haunt the world of the living and little by little drag them to the afterlife. As is the case with the drivers that Enzo puts behind the wheel of his racing single-seat cars (including Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey), in a reasonable pursuit of the best time on the track and victory in the Mille Miglia. As it happens when you think about it, including with Enzo himself, a ghost who in the first moments of the film is the protagonist of some “impossible” archival images while he is driving his car, because he is an Enzo with Driver traits and because they shot with shots that could not have been achieved at the beginning of the 20th century.
The difficult question of language
And in this leaden tone, adaptation is articulated Troy Kennedy Martin from the biography Enzo Ferrari: Man and Machine Brock Yeats, a tale of marriage and professional travail in the Ferrari household following the premature and painful departure of the house’s only offspring. But let’s deal with it right now one of the hottest topics in the movie. In other words, the decision to make a portrait of such an iconic character in the culture of Italy using international stars would thus work with a linguistic mixture where the use of English (in the foreground) and Italian (which remains to a certain extent) layered and chattered in the background).
Recent precedents did not bode well, as House of Gucci (strange as it may seem, always with Driver among the main characters) managed to excel only when, also due to this mixture of languages, it bordered on self-parody. ferrari avoids this danger, if only because it is charged with a completely different emotional pathos, but still cannot avoid the inevitableor create a permanent dissonance between surrender and acceptance. And in this context, this is not the type of dissonance that is useful for clarifying the narrative, for declaring and describing the detachment from the life of its heroes. It’s a kind of distracting dissonance that often takes you away for small moments from a movie that tries to focus on the complete loss of the horizon of a man and woman so far removed from life.
Appearance and legacy
Except for the linguistic question – that is, the question – ferrari this especially blurs the view of Enzo, who, in the very close-ups that Mann decides to dedicate to him, works precisely with the focus on what surrounds him. ferrari In short, this tells us that Enzo lost perspectivethe line of a torn future, when the very possibility of a dynasty, the transfer of inheritance was broken.
And above this also fuels the ambiguity of a man who remains in an unresolvable state of mourning continuing in one house and new hope to be nurtured in another, in that villa where Enzo warms the bed of his beloved Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and where his unrecognized son Pierrot is waiting for him. But the ash veil that wraps Mann’s film is probably more mesmerizing than the structure it wraps around, divided three-quarters into a story stretched between the squabbles of a sinking marriage and the financial structure of a car company that needs to be fully restored, while in the last moment remains the place for the Mille Miglia race.
If the proposal does the movie
However, there is no real proximity to the pain of these characters.encased in the logical coldness of Enzo and the sclerotic intolerance of Laura, the new artistic character now approached by Cruz. You float on the surface of their wretched existence, just as you don’t really get too excited about the approach to racing – but it’s not a sports movie, despite a couple of misdirections and therefore no recriminations.
In short, the overall return is less reliable than the underlying assumption.including due to some technical imperfections such as a lubricated assembly in some situations (Peter Scalia) and soundtrack (Daniel Pemberton) more than once on a pedantic occasion. And this combination of factors in the long run punishes Mann’s vision, which remains in the middle and a little tormented, like the souls he wanted to tell us about.