Michael Mann’s Ferrari is propulsive prestige drama, though it could’ve used an engine check

Ferrari

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Troy Kennedy Martin, based on the book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates

Starring Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz and Shailene Woodley

Classification 14A; 130 minutes

Opens in theatres Dec. 25

Critic’s Pick

The great thrill of watching the new film Ferrari is realizing that not only does the world still have time for Michael Mann, but that Michael Mann still has time for us.

After the underwhelming reception to his 2015 crime thriller Blackhat, the director could have easily stepped away from Hollywood forever, leaving a canon of ice-veined classics for audiences to revisit for decades to come. If Mann had only given us Miami Vice (the TV show), that would have been enough. The fact that he also gave us Miami Vice (the movie) plus Thief, Heat, Collateral, The Insider, and so many more men-being-men masterpieces is bordering on the absurd. It is a run as clean and cool as any of his contemporaries.

Thus, any new Michael Mann film must be greeted with open arms, wide eyes, a firm grip. If the 80-year-old filmmaker is saying something, then we should listen, and carefully.

Yet with Ferrari, there is the alternately nagging and overwhelming sense that the past eight years have if not tempered Mann’s tenacity, then decelerated his slow-burn spirit. Or to put it in the language of Ferrari itself, this is a movie that swerves nervously, rather than coasts confidently, across the blood-splattered finish line.

The film invites skeptical side-eye from its first few seconds, when Mann plunks Adam Driver into sepia-tinged faux-archival footage of Enzo Ferrari, automotive innovator and daredevil, racing around a track. It is a sequence that suggests a dorky kind of cheerleading that feels at odds with the film’s overall tone, to say nothing of Mann’s typically high-precision style. It might be Mann’s way of underlining how Enzo’s pure enthusiasm for the sport got corrupted by the spirit of competition (both on the track and in the boardroom), but it lands as stylistically and emotionally incongruous, if not downright goofy.

Perhaps its inclusion is Mann simply trying to get the jump on his own director’s cut, introducing an element that he knows doesn’t make sense but will eventually be rectified. It is not dissimilar, after all, to when the director replaced the heart-thumping but rather silly club beats that open 2006′s Miami Vice with more romantic, atmosphere-rich overhead shots of go-fast boats in his eventual DVD reworking of that film.

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Whatever Mann’s opening-film intentions, Ferrari picks up considerably once it flashes forward to the summer of 1957, a pivotal time in Enzo’s life. His eponymous company is on the verge of bankruptcy, his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) wants him to officially recognize their young son Pierro by giving him the Ferrari surname, and his marriage to Laura (Penelope Cruz) is in tatters as the couple mourn the death of their adult son Alfredo as a result of muscular dystrophy. (This last strain of tension is especially problematic for Enzo since Laura owns half of the automaker.) Then there’s the fact that Enzo needs a new driver to participate in the famed Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile race whose outcome might buoy or sink his financial future.

The personal and professional crises blur into one thick cloud of anxiety for Enzo, who is cut from the same fine cloth as any Mann hero: tightly wound but calm under pressure, mechanical in mind yet cursed with an incurably romantic heart, honourable in spirit but surrounded by temptation.

As a 59-year-old Italian man long past his physical prime, the role of Enzo shouldn’t be a natural fit for the 40-year-old Driver. Yet the pairing feels like a kind of manifested destiny on-screen, with Driver sinking into the character – all deep and primal determination mixed with the emotional and spiritual distance of a man who knows he will never again feel whole. And Mann captures his star with equal parts reverence and pity. Enzo is a giant of Italy one moment, the walking wounded the next.

Driver even improves upon his Italian accent, which he first tried on in Ridley Scott’s 2021 soap opera House of Gucci. Less successful are the actor’s fellow American co-stars, ranging from the Italian-ish Patrick Dempsey (as racer Piero Taruffi) to the mamma-mia aspirations of Woodley (whose accent is alternately so shaky or non-existent that I had to double-check whether Lina was actually Italian in real life; she was!).

Cruz, although Spanish, can pull off the Italian job with far more ease. And indeed it is her scenes, either alongside Driver or with those playing Enzo’s many bankers and underlings, that deliver the biggest emotional wallops. Mourning her only child, her marriage, and very likely her fortune as the betrayed and sidelined Laura, Cruz goes scorched-earth, incinerating any performer sharing her space.

Also perfectly cast is Canadian actress Sarah Gadon as, appropriately, a classical movie star – the girlfriend of Enzo’s new star driver, Alfonso de Portago, played with his own kind of slick charm by Gabriel Leone.

Ever the meticulous technician, Mann ensures that his film’s racing scenes are as rooted in verisimilitude as they are in pulse-quickening electricity. Enzo knows that on the track, each second counts, a maxim that Mann holds onto tight, ensuring that audiences feel every turn of the wheel and twist of the road.

At least that is the case until the very final stretch of the Mille Miglia, during which an unfortunate bit of CGI-enabled vehicular carnage nearly drains the emotional impact of a climactic sequence. A moment that should be horrific is instead sullied by the most regrettable kind of aesthetic silliness. It is so eye-popping, in all the wrong ways, that it is a wonder that Mann ever let it out of the gate.

But perhaps matters will be rectified in the director’s cut.

For All Mann-kind: The Films of Michael Mann, Ranked:

1. Heat (1995)

2. The Insider (1999)

3. Thief (1981)

4. Miami Vice (2006)

5. The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

6. Manhunter (1986)

7. Collateral (2004)

8. Ali (2001)

9. Blackhat (2015)

10. Ferrari (2023)

11. Public Enemies (2009)

12. The Keep (1983)