Jonah Naplan   December 31, 2023

Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is an icy, calculated businessman who always seems at an arm's distance away, so it’s rather fitting that Michael Mann’s biopic about him is icy, calculated and at an arm's distance away. The movie, written by Troy Kennedy Martin, is an exploration of a man driven—quite literally and figuratively—by power and the will to stay on top of an industry he revolutionized. Throughout, Ferrari will demonstrate the lengths to which he’ll try to retain that title, either by pushing the limits of man farther than they can be prodded, or by severely endangering his drivers as long as there’s a reward on the other end. But the prize may as well be a donut hanging on a string, and Ferrari is the dog running towards it on a treadmill. Success will not come easy, and neither will our interest in this dull, long, and emotionally sparse film.

It takes place in 1957. Enzo Ferrari has been regarded as a sort of God amidst the Italian population, but as he nears the age of 60, extreme pressures of perfection are put upon his broad shoulders, both in his work and home lives. The latter stems from his tumultuous relationships with two different women; the more transactional one being with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), who was instrumental in founding the Ferrari company alongside Enzo, but has now become exhausted with her husband’s opaque intractability and workaholic nature; and the more sincere one being with his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom he had a son named Piero (who is currently the real life vice chairman of the Ferrari company). Enzo had a son with Laura too, named Alfredo, but after he died of muscle disease, the man was torn to bits by the loss, wallowing around in his grief, despite Laura’s tired pleas for him to move on. Woodley and Cruz deliver the film’s best performances, finding just the right degree of nuance in their roles to capture our attention whenever they’re onscreen—the film’s emotional center, if you could even claim it has one.

That’s because everything about “Ferrari” feels impossible to grasp. It focuses on a character not dissimilar from other protagonists of many a Michael Mann picture, but this one feels especially far away, like you couldn’t even come close to reaching out and touching him. That vast emotional distance makes everything else in the movie challenging to connect with—the people, the stakes, the morals. It was difficult at first to put my finger on what exactly wasn’t working here; then I realized it was Driver’s performance. It’s not just his obviously phony Italian accent that comes and goes as it pleases, sometimes mid-sentence. It’s that the character choices he’s making don’t advance our knowledge of who he is as a person, why he’s making risky decisions that could imperil the future of his company, or how he stays motivated to never change his ways. Most of this isn’t even Driver’s fault; the script itself is engineered around the very idea of his cold, rigid attitude, and everyone surrounding Enzo is frustrated that they can never connect with him either.

It’s also because the film doesn’t really try to resonate with us emotionally until about the last 20-25 minutes, when Enzo really starts to feel the deadly impact of his poor judgment, a boomerang that cycles around and strikes him in the back of the head after waiting for so long. Mann tests the internal turmoil of Ferrari by pitting him against financial troubles, marriage conflicts, and public expectation, but none of it entirely registers because it all seems to be of insincere intention. The film’s biggest stand-outs are probably not the stuff you’d expect coming from such a master of the form as Mann, but the only things that might stick with me into the next year are the racing sequences themselves, which are sorrily infrequent while ably shot by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, who’s working in service of making something out of nothing.

Ferrari’s racers—the most notable of which are played by Patrick Dempsey, Jack O’Connell, and Gabriel Leone—have little distinct personality between each other, yet the movie wants us to care about each individually as they risk their lives in pushing to cross the finish line. The result is less than convincing, despite eager attempts all around, and efforts to humanize Enzo’s character by giving them each little pep talks before they set off in the climactic race known as the Mille Miglia. Enzo himself was put on trial in the years post-1957 for manslaughter after one of his racers spun out of control and killed nine spectators in the act. Those court hearings are not shown in this picture; it ends shortly after the Mille Miglia, which would end up being the last of its kind, presumably because of Ferrari.

But because “Ferrari” doesn’t depict the consequences of this event, a horrific tragedy that Enzo wasn’t technically responsible for, the viewer is left to wonder why this story needed to be told in 2023, a year in which many powerful men have already gotten away with their pernicious schemes. There’s no real point to “Ferrari,” nor is there much intrigue, tension, or drama—at least none that we can hold onto anyway. When you’re this disconnected from the story and characters, it’s hard to not be bored by what you’re watching, which makes Mann’s film virtually inaccessible and hard to buy into unless you’ve already accepted the dictum that Enzo is a difficult man, made of difficult parts, who’s impossible to penetrate on an emotional level. Despite its technical acumen, “Ferrari” will not shake you, or even make you think. You might enter the vehicle pumped, but that adrenaline will run dry.

Now playing in theaters.