Summary

Ferrari explores the duality and contrasts in Enzo Ferrari’s life, from his troubled marriage to his struggle to save his company. The film’s constant doubling and mirroring reflect Enzo’s attempt to occupy two points in space and the binary choices he faces. Ferrari is not just about entertainment, but delves deeper into the themes of joy, contradiction, and the simultaneous nature of life.

“Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time.” This line has been a focus of the trailers for Michael Mann’s Ferrari, and was lodged in my memory. I now understand why it’s been so foregrounded — it ended up being my guide through the movie’s ideas. In the scene in which it’s spoken by a frustrated Enzo Ferrari to his racers, it resounds with obvious truth. The delivery is part of this; as a general rule, Enzo does not speak so much as proclaim. But your experience with this story and how it’s told will depend on your willingness to question his assertion, as I believe Ferrari does.

Ferrari Ferrari is a dramatized biopic about Enzo Ferrari, detailing his family problems and his struggle to prepare for the 1957 Mille Miglia. The film stars Adam driver as Enzo Ferrari, alongside Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, and Gabriel Leone. Heat director Michael Mann helms the film and also worked on Ferrari’s script. Release Date December 25, 2023 Director Adam Driver , Shailene Woodley , Jack O’Connell , Sarah Gadon , Penelope Cruz , Patrick Dempsey Cast Michael Mann , Brock Yates Runtime 130 Minutes Genres Biography , Drama , History Writers Troy Kennedy-Martin , Michael Mann , Brock Yates Distributor(s) Neon , STXfilms

Directed by Mann from a script by Troy Kennedy Martin, the film follows Enzo (Adam Driver) during the summer of 1957, a critical time both personally and professionally. His company is on the brink of bankruptcy. Too much has been spent on racing and too little on consumer sales, and Ferrari will now require a partner, threatening Enzo’s independence. To retain control, he must be in a better negotiating position, which requires much better sales – and the only way to sell more cars is to win big at Italy’s Mille Miglia race.

At the same time, his family life is also reaching a breaking point. His marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz), who owns half of the company, has eroded. The death of their only son, Dino, the year before left them with some toxic mixture of love, grief, and resentment. Laura knows about, and begrudgingly tolerates, Enzo’s infidelity. She doesn’t know about Lina Laudi (Shailene Woodley), who is more of a second partner than a mistress, nor about Piero, her husband’s other, still-living child. In just this broad setup, the movie’s interest in doubling and contrast is already apparent — two families, two partnerships, two sons. Two spheres of interest to split Enzo’s focus, and two genres (biographical drama and sports thriller) for the film to straddle.

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Ferrari Is A Study In Contrasts

But look deeper, and suddenly you’ll see it everywhere. Dino inherited his name from Enzo’s brother, who died in World War I, and the two share a tomb. He and Laura lost Dino to degenerative illness, and their company’s financial woes will be terminal without a cash injection. At the story’s opening, Enzo wakes in bed with Lina, kissing her tenderly before quietly slipping out. Laura, meanwhile, stares daggers at Enzo’s empty single bed, and a loud fight ensues upon his return. Later that day, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) arrives in Modena to lobby for a spot on Ferrari’s team, early to fill a gap that opens with a driver’s deadly crash hours later.

If entertainment is all you’re looking for, you’ll find it, and you’ll even have the fun of debating the accents and VFX as you leave the theater. But there’s also a lot more to find beneath its surface pleasures.

This manifests in the form of Ferrari as well. Driving scenes, all sound and fury and editing, are often punctuated with shots of the serene countryside they disturb, the camera lingering on a tree after a car has sped past it. When Enzo visits the family tomb, Mann frames him between his son and brother’s eerily mirrored headstones. Everywhere we look, the movie teaches us to see in twos, to understand everything in terms of its similarities and differences to something else.

It is possible to see all these choices as an acceptance of Enzo’s framework, which would make for a disappointingly obvious experience. In a twist on his two objects line, this reading would position him as trying to occupy two points in space at the same moment in time, another physical impossibility. The movie, then, builds to a binary choice between families. The Mille Miglia is either won or lost. Ferrari either survives or fails. But not everything is an object, and to see Ferrari’s constant doubling as an embrace of either/or absolutism is to miss its fascination with the simultaneous.

In the very same speech to his drivers, Enzo describes the sport as “our deadly passion, our terrible joy.” These contradictions coexist, and become more truthful than either would be alone. The performances of Driver and Cruz are built on this principle. Enzo is direct and methodical, a figure of unyielding authority, who cannot control the destiny of either his drivers or his company, nor bring himself to confront his wife with the truth. Driver plays him both impotently powerful and powerfully impotent. Laura is emotional, erratic, and shrewdly strategic, as impulsive as she is calculated. Cruz gives her the physicality of someone so full of feeling that her emotions are always on the brink of spilling over, but knowing eyes keep her grounded.

Terrible joy is the true subject of this film. It describes not only the dual climaxes of the race and Enzo and Laura’s cards-on-the-table confrontation, but even our ability to experience what’s happening onscreen as entertainment. And Enzo’s arc is not toward a binary, but away from one. He spends the movie trying to bifurcate what must ultimately coexist. It gives a thoughtful, thorny spine to what audiences are likely expecting (and will receive) from Ferrari: Great actors doing accents and performing dramatic scenes, intermixed with some thrillingly executed racing.

The movie is also, and frequently, quite funny, though the funniest character, Enzo’s mother (Daniela Piperno), is fittingly also the most wounding. If entertainment is all you’re looking for, you’ll find it, and you’ll even have the fun of debating the accents and VFX as you leave the theater. But there’s also a lot more to find beneath its surface pleasures, making it a worthy Christmas capstone for what has been a very good year for adults at the movies.

Ferrari releases in US theaters on December 25. The film is 130 minutes long and is rated R for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language.