One way to look at Michael Mann's "Ferrari" is as an unauthorized prequel to 2019's "Ford v. Ferrari," James Mangold's crowd-pleasing semi-accurate account of how Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) hired automotive designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to defeat the perennially dominant Scuderia Ferrari racing team at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France.
In that film, Enzo Ferrari (played by Italian actor Remo Girone) is portrayed as a dismissive aristocrat who brusquely rejects Ford's offer to buy his company outright, insulting Ford (both the man and the company) in the process. In the film he tells Ford's representatives he could never sell out to an ugly company that builds ugly cars in an ugly factory. And by the way, Henry II, your grandfather was the real Henry Ford.
Ferrari then cuts a deal with Fiat that allows him to keep control of his company, while Ford goes back to Detroit to assemble the team that will defeat Ferrari and avenge his injured feelings.
The current "Ferrari" is set largely in 1957, a pivotal year in the life of the racing icon. While Enzo (a stoic performance by Adam Driver) is one of the most famous men in Italy, his business is foundering and his marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz), who is also his business partner, is practically untenable.
They have an arrangement -- Enzo can sleep where and with whomever he likes, so long as he is back home at his gloomy Modena mansion before the maid arrives in the morning. Lately this agreement has been more honored in the breach than observed, and what Laura doesn't know (though almost everyone else in Modena does) is that Enzo has another family, his longtime lover Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), stashed in the countryside.
When Laura finds out, she doesn't take this well. Which is bad for Enzo because Laura has him pretty much money-whipped. He can't do anything with his company without her consent.
The kid in the country is all the more significant because Enzo and Laura's 24-year-old son Dino -- an automotive engineer who seemed poised to one day take over his father's company -- died about a year before the action of this film. Laura blames Enzo and Enzo blames himself for Dino's death -- his narcissism is such he believed he could save the boy through the exertion of his will.
On top of that, Ferrari -- the marque -- is neither producing nor selling enough "customer cars" to stay afloat. While Enzo -- who everyone knows as "the Commendatore" -- doesn't care much about selling cars, he understands that the business supports his beloved racing team and understands that in order to continue his passion he will eventually have to partner with one of the big car companies, either Ford or Fiat. If it is to continue to exist, it is inevitable that Ferrari become a boutique subsidiary of a larger company.
But Enzo wants to be in position to dictate favorable terms. So he decides he needs to beat arch-rival Maserati in the open-road 1,000-mile Mille Miglia.
Since "Ferrari" is based on actual events as recounted in the late Brock Yates' 1991 biography "Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine," the outcome of the race is never in doubt. But Mann isn't that interested in that story, though he does film these racing cars, which we are told were actually moving fast with loving grace and geometrical precision.
One of the best comparisons might be "Top Gun: Maverick," as the practical effects have more gravity than the CGI-created ones we've come to expect in big blunt movies.
Speaking of special effects, Cruz's Laura is the best thing in the movie. Laura, who sometimes seems like a character imported from an Almodovar film, is perpetually downtrodden and feisty, always on the brink of tears or violence or both. (An obvious reference is Anna Magnani, the Italian actor who became famous for playing emotionally explosive, earthy lower-class women in films like "L'Amore" (1948), "Bellissima" (1951), "The Rose Tattoo" (1955), "The Fugitive Kind" (1960) and "Mamma Roma" (1962).
Trapped in a failed marriage (the movie doesn't mention that Italian law didn't permit divorce until 1970), we are given to believe that this intelligent woman is still susceptible to Enzo's nearly imperceptible charm. She outsmarts her faithless husband, she wants to shoot him, but in the end she can't deny the big lug the chance to play with his race cars.
Which is an inherently dangerous business.
Enzo is haunted by crashes that killed his friends (in real life he probably walked away from racing because their deaths hit too close to home) but weirdly cavalier with the lives of his drivers, ill-fated Spaniard Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone), Brit Peter Collins (Jack O'Connell) and veteran Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey).
Yes, it is the business they have chosen. Enzo can pay lip service to the innocent spectators who die when one of his cars flies out of control, but his main concern is damage control. While I admire the pitilessness of Driver's performance -- his unwillingness to bid for our empathy -- the overwhelming effect is of a cruel man.
But unlike some of Mann's other troubled male protagonists -- James Caan's Frank in "Thief" (1981) or Robert De Niro's Neil McCauley in "Heat" (1995) -- Enzo lacks complication. He cares about racing, and about being perceived as the Commendatore. There's not that much to him.
Similarly, while Woodley is fine as Lina (though her accent comes and goes -- for a few moments we thought Enzo's mistress was an American), the character seems to exist to demonstrate a contrast to Enzo's life with Laura. There's a mildness to the scenes with Lina that suggests flagging investment.
Most of the characters speak English with Italian accents except when they speak Italian. And while I'm sure that the race cars are accurate, it's often hard to tell the Maseratis from the Ferraris during the Mille Miglia. We could have used a program.
Racing action aside, "Ferrari" is more a stolid soap opera than a portrait of an obsessed, arrogant legend. Driver is a big man, and uses his physical bearing in interesting ways, dominating nearly all the scenes he appears in by filling the screen with his shoulders. His Enzo is taciturn and calculating, and Driver restrains his natural tendency to endearing goofiness to give us a proud and icy taskmaster.
At one point, Laura remarks on how he no longer displays the warmth and wit he once did, and we can only agree. Driver's Enzo may be exactly what the actor and the director intended, but he's for sure no fun.
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NoneCast: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O'Connell, Patrick Dempsey, Michele Savoia, Erik Haugen, Giuseppe Bonifati
Director: Michael Mann
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Playing theatrically