Here is a film showing us the great Enzo Ferrari who is, in the words of the song, always crashing in the same car. Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin and director Michael Mann give us Adam Driver as the harassed, greying, paunchy Enzo, the petrolhead hero turned owner of the legendary family business, grinding unsmilingly round and round the race-track circuit of his life in late 1950s Modena.
Enzo is increasingly outclassed by the upstarts at Maserati, looking for a win, looking for way out of bankruptcy, looking for way to placate his embittered wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) in whose name he has rashly put the business assets, looking for a way to acknowledge his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) who has borne him a son after his older boy, with Laura, tragically died. He is played with conviction and impassive stoicism by Driver, and the actor’s surname is actually inappropriate: Enzo’s days of sexily driving sleek race cars are behind him. He is an administrator these days, driving a dull bulbous little vehicle more suited to a bank manager.
Driver is mostly behind dark glasses and has the same Italian-a accent-a he had as Maurizio Gucci in Ridley Scott’s outrageous melodrama House of Gucci. But here he does not have the same unabashed exuberance and silly fun that allowed him to get away with that impersonation. This in fact is a man with the world on his shoulders – a man who grimly sends his drivers into a race with an air of a first world war general sending his troops over the top.
The result is a film which, though watchable, is a weird combination of brash and dour, rarely putting its pedal to the metal. It has some impressive and deafening race scenes, set in that extraordinary era when there was no safety either for drivers or the crowds behind the straw bales (or behind nothing at all). But it only really comes to life at the moments of pure horror – one death of a driver early on and then later a grotesque tragedy involving nine members of the public, four adults and five children.
Mann recreates these macabre spectacles with terrific elan: the image of a dead driver flying through the air in long shot like a distant bird is nightmarish and inspired. But just as the racecar business itself unreflectively just carries on after the carnage, so the film itself does not find a way to absorb the pointless culpable horror of it all, relapsing into a stolid, almost joyless determination.
Enzo’s big idea to save the Ferrari firm’s financial fortunes is to sell lots more sports cars to rich men, and the way to do that is with a big victory at the Mille Miglia, the now defunct Italian endurance road race which went all over the country. It was an Italian institution that caused people to pour into the streets to cheer the racers as they zoomed unsafely by. (Fellini’s Amarcord in fact has a Mille Miglia scene.) A traditional Hollywood drama would have Ferrari finally winning the race and getting a feelgood rush of victory in his personal life as well. Well, that’s not exactly what happens, and it’s not really clear exactly what Ferrari has learned from the horror crash.
Cruz brings gall, spite and passion to the role of Laura, but there’s not much for Woodley to do in the thankless role of Lina. And Driver is a remote and unengaging paterfamilias. But no one could doubt the style with which Mann stages those race scenes, with their danger and horror.
• Ferrari screened at the Venice film festival.
