Ferrari
Having a fascinating central figure, a legendary brand and an era when every race could brush against death is not enough. If a film cannot bring you emotionally close to that world, everything can remain strangely distant. That is what happened to me here: there is more than enough material to be gripping, yet for much of the running time I struggled to find a way into it.
Michael Mann concentrates on a very specific period in Enzo Ferrari's life and avoids the conventional biographical journey from youth to glory. The choice makes sense: it allows business pressure, grief, a divided private life and the need to keep a company afloat through both prestige and racing results to coexist within a compressed period.
Adam Driver builds an Enzo who is controlled, dry and difficult to read. The problem is that this coldness gradually spreads to the film itself. I understand the intention: this is a man accustomed to separating emotion, family and business into different compartments. But understanding that distance does not necessarily mean connecting with it.
Penélope Cruz brings far more electricity as Laura. Whenever she appears, you can feel resentment, pain and the sense of having been pushed aside from a life she also helped build. Against Enzo's restraint, she introduces a much more immediate and human energy.
Shailene Woodley also works for me because I have always found her a very natural and expressive actress, but her character here is deliberately restrained, which limits what she can contribute. Even though I like her a lot, the sentimental side still never fully drew me in.
The business material is interesting, especially because the film shows how much Ferrari needed racing not merely as sport, but as publicity, identity and economic survival. Yet many of those tensions are presented with a solemnity that kept me more as an observer than a participant.
Where Mann really recovers his force is in the racing. The film suddenly changes there: sound, speed, the physical presence of the cars and the vulnerability of the people driving them create a tension the rest of the story rarely reaches. One particularly brutal sequence breaks through the earlier distance and reminds us how closely that era of motor racing lived with a level of danger that is difficult to imagine today.
I also became more interested afterwards, once I learned how much of what surrounds the story was real. Paradoxically, reading about Ferrari, his drivers and that period of racing was more absorbing to me than some sections of the film itself. That says a lot about my main problem with it: I was more interested in what it was telling me than in the way it made me feel about it.
Technically, it is solid and carefully made, and Mann clearly understands the kind of men obsessed with work that he has spent decades filming. This time, though, that obsession never pulled me in. It lacks some of the emotional electricity I find in his best films.
Ferrari did not strike me as a bad film. It has powerful performances, excellent racing sequences and a true story containing enormous drama. But it left me cold for too long. Its most powerful moments belong to the racing world; the rest, despite grief, business and damaged relationships, remained at a distance. Competent and interesting for what it depicts, but much less involving than I expected.
Michael Mann concentrates on a very specific period in Enzo Ferrari's life and avoids the conventional biographical journey from youth to glory. The choice makes sense: it allows business pressure, grief, a divided private life and the need to keep a company afloat through both prestige and racing results to coexist within a compressed period.
Adam Driver builds an Enzo who is controlled, dry and difficult to read. The problem is that this coldness gradually spreads to the film itself. I understand the intention: this is a man accustomed to separating emotion, family and business into different compartments. But understanding that distance does not necessarily mean connecting with it.
Penélope Cruz brings far more electricity as Laura. Whenever she appears, you can feel resentment, pain and the sense of having been pushed aside from a life she also helped build. Against Enzo's restraint, she introduces a much more immediate and human energy.
Shailene Woodley also works for me because I have always found her a very natural and expressive actress, but her character here is deliberately restrained, which limits what she can contribute. Even though I like her a lot, the sentimental side still never fully drew me in.
The business material is interesting, especially because the film shows how much Ferrari needed racing not merely as sport, but as publicity, identity and economic survival. Yet many of those tensions are presented with a solemnity that kept me more as an observer than a participant.
Where Mann really recovers his force is in the racing. The film suddenly changes there: sound, speed, the physical presence of the cars and the vulnerability of the people driving them create a tension the rest of the story rarely reaches. One particularly brutal sequence breaks through the earlier distance and reminds us how closely that era of motor racing lived with a level of danger that is difficult to imagine today.
I also became more interested afterwards, once I learned how much of what surrounds the story was real. Paradoxically, reading about Ferrari, his drivers and that period of racing was more absorbing to me than some sections of the film itself. That says a lot about my main problem with it: I was more interested in what it was telling me than in the way it made me feel about it.
Technically, it is solid and carefully made, and Mann clearly understands the kind of men obsessed with work that he has spent decades filming. This time, though, that obsession never pulled me in. It lacks some of the emotional electricity I find in his best films.
Ferrari did not strike me as a bad film. It has powerful performances, excellent racing sequences and a true story containing enormous drama. But it left me cold for too long. Its most powerful moments belong to the racing world; the rest, despite grief, business and damaged relationships, remained at a distance. Competent and interesting for what it depicts, but much less involving than I expected.
Mini Review: Having a fascinating central figure, a legendary brand and an era when every race could brush against death is not enough. If a film cannot bring you emotionally close to that world, everything can remain strangely distant. That is what happened to me here: there is more than enough material to be gripping, yet for much of the running time I struggled to find a way into it. Michael Mann concentrates on a very specific period in Enzo Ferrari's...
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