To those of us who are not racing-history aficionados, and to whom the catastrophic events of the 1957 Mille Miglia are not well known, the ostensible climax of Michael Mann’s Ferrari might come as quite a shock. Not just because of the carnage in full display onscreen, but because of the subtle ways the picture has maneuvered our expectations up until this point. Throughout the film, Mann has set up this upcoming cross-country race (“A thousand miles across bad roads with sheep and dogs — anything can happen,†as Penélope Cruz’s Laura Ferrari memorably puts it) as a make-or-break moment for Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver). The automaker’s business is about to collapse under heavy debt and a recent string of failures. “Win the Mille Miglia, Enzo. Attract outside financing. Or you are out of business,†warns his lawyer and consigliere, Giacomo Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati). We know, of course, that Ferrari the brand survived, so we feel confident that Enzo’s team will emerge triumphant from the race.
The film has also been setting up the young Spanish racer Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) as an up-and-comer who looks set to turn Ferrari’s fortunes around. That Enzo initially rejects his appeals to join the team subconsciously solidifies in our minds the idea that de Portago will be victorious, as does the fact that the Spaniard falters in an earlier race, earning Enzo’s ire and setting up his presumed third-act redemption. That’s how racing movies work, isn’t it? De Portago is a classic underdog. So, when his car flies off the road at Guidizzolo and slices through a group of spectators, leaving many dead and the driver himself — once so young, charismatic, and full of promise — graphically severed in half, we are shocked on multiple levels.
The Guidizzolo crash is downright scarring. (It was in reality too. The Mille Miglia race, never a safe race to begin with, was canceled after the events of 1957.) Mann doesn’t shy away from showing the full extent of the devastation. “They’re savage,†he said about these race cars when I interviewed him about the film. “They can kill you in a heartbeat. They have more power than you can handle. They have more power than the brakes can handle. One tiny thing goes wrong and the result is catastrophic.â€
To re-create this sequence, the director and his team did an intense amount of research, including looking at perhaps the most ghastly racing disaster ever recorded on film, the notorious 1955 Le Mans crash that claimed the lives of 83 people, including Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh. That footage, captured by a BBC camera, bears the marks of time and is (thankfully) not entirely clear. It’s also very fast; it takes a beat to realize that these are actual people Levegh’s car is chain-sawing its way through. In Ferrari, Mann and his team re-create a variation on that incident, but they also let the crash occur slower, so that we actually see the humans being plowed under the car. Editor Pietro Scalia recalls that it was important for Mann that the devastation happen in one single shot, without any cuts. This is a visceral and uncanny horror, the stuff of nightmares. We’ve seen lots of car crashes on film; we’ve probably never seen one this disturbing. You may not ever want to enter a car again after seeing it.
While researching the incident and the actual location of the crash, Mann was approached by an elderly man who recalled that his older brother was one of the victims at Guidizzolo. The director then added a scene with this family into the film, to give yet another human face to the disaster. “We need the audience to understand,†cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt recalls the director saying. Mann wants us to see the brutality of this sport, and also perhaps the consequences of Enzo’s drive to succeed, his admonition to his racers to throw caution to the wind and to always go faster — to “brake later,†as he puts it.
Enzo is not the villain of Ferrari, but he is obsessed with winning, and he may well hold some responsibility for these deaths. In the film, right before the crash at Guidizzolo, it becomes clear that Ferrari’s drivers are basically guaranteed a win at the Mille Miglia; their chief competitor, Maserati, has abandoned the race after its cars broke down or crashed. De Portago has prevailed over his French nemesis Jean Behra (Derek Hill) after doing what Enzo had advised him to do: not letting up as Behra tried to run him off the road. But then, still eager to prove himself, de Portago refuses to let the pit crew replace his tires, as if taking Enzo’s words too much to heart. (“When you get into one of my cars — and no one is forcing you to enter — you get in to win.â€)
At this point, Ferrari’s drivers are all effectively competing against one another, something Enzo encourages as he sends each on his way. The sporting thing to do would be to slow down and play it safe. But these are not sportsmen, as Enzo himself said earlier. They are competitors. His engineers suggest that he should order the drivers to hold their positions, now that a win is virtually guaranteed. Enzo’s response? “They’ll wipe out or they won’t! My factory is built on racing. They are racers.†To these people, racing is a state of being. Death can come at any second, and they’ve accepted this fact. One of the film’s more moving sequences shows the drivers writing letters to their loved ones the evening before the race, to be delivered in case of their deaths.
Has Enzo’s overwhelming desire for victory led to this catastrophe? He’s clearly asking himself this question as well. Earlier, he reflects that 24 years ago, after a disastrous crash that claimed the lives of his friends Baconin Borzacchini and Giuseppe Campari “in the metal I made,†he told himself not to let his emotions get in the way of his racing. “I knew then that it was ‘Enzo build a wall’ … Or Enzo go do something else.†At the crash site at Guidizzolo, we see the soul-crushing consequences of this attitude. Watch the tension on Driver’s face as he wanders through this scene at night and you will see a man being torn to pieces inside.
“We’ve come to collect the car,†says one of his employees to the authorities as they approach what remains of the vehicle, a mangled and unrecognizable mess of metal and rubber in the darkness. Other people are mourning dead parents and children and friends, but Enzo won’t let himself look at them; all he has is a dead car. Later, when he’s told that in racing “we all know death is nearby,†he replies, “No, children don’t know. Families don’t know.†One wonders if at this moment he is thinking of his own recently deceased son, Dino, whose illness did not involve racing or cars, but whose death still haunts him, still reminds him of his helplessness.
Throughout Ferrari, Mann has juxtaposed Enzo’s ambitions on the race track with the tense holding pattern of his personal life. He lives with and is married to Laura, in a dark, loveless home filled with grief, while raising another son, Piero, with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) in a sunny farmhouse. Enzo refuses to officially recognize Piero and keeps Laura in the dark about this other family. On the track, all is progress, speed, forward momentum. At home, all is stasis. But now, in a deadly crash that has killed five kids, the two worlds merge in a spiritually tragic way; the grieving father has created more grieving fathers. We might expect at this moment for Enzo to learn some kind of valuable lesson, to come to some kind of climactic self-awareness, so that the film can move toward emotional resolution. We get little indication that he has. He is, after all, one of Mann’s existential protagonists, simultaneously compelled to his profession and imprisoned by it. “All I am is what I am going after,†as Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna once put it in Heat.
But then the true climax of Ferrari comes. Right after the crash, Enzo learns that Laura has cashed the check that he had given her earlier for her share of the business, something she had agreed not to do until after Enzo had negotiated with Fiat for the sale of his company. (“This is a gun pointed at our heads,†Enzo had told her. “You cash it before I conclude the deal, Ferrari is no more.â€) The revelation that she has cashed the check is yet another nail in his coffin. Returning home to find her sitting alone in the dark, he tells her that she has bankrupted the company.
It turns out, however, that she is one step ahead of him. Earlier, after another fatal car crash, the Italian press was all too eager to depict Enzo as a monstrous, murderous figure. (“Ferrari is an industrial Saturn, devouring his children,†went one colorful passage.) Now, Laura tells him that the reason she cashed the check was because Enzo will need money to bribe the journalists covering the crash. “Go beat the hell out of them. They’re writers, those cheap hacks. Threaten them, extort them,†she says. “And those still on their feet, the most sanctimonious and hypocritical, those you give them brown envelopes … And for that you need the cash.†In essence, she’s saved his company — albeit by setting up a brazen act of corruption. It is an act that is at once heroic, sacrificial, and totally debased. Again, Mann does not provide easy answers or clean resolutions.
Enzo suspects that there’s something Laura will want in return. “And the conditions are?†he asks. “No conditions,†she says. And then she launches into the film’s most powerful soliloquy, telling Enzo about the love and warmth she once saw in him: “There was a part of you in Dino,†she says quietly. “Your warmth, your wit, your joy. He had that. I had that from you in our early years. But after a time, I only got what was left when you came home from the fight in the factory. The ambition, the drive, the plots, the paranoia.â€
It’s a reminder that we have never once seen Enzo be tender with this woman who is his wife and partner — even during their one sex scene, which is more animalistic than intimate. When Laura speaks of how “the fight in the factory†left Enzo drained of warmth and compassion, she’s highlighting something else we might have noticed about this man: Everything for him is about cars and racing. When he talks to Lina Lardi, it’s about what happened that day at work. When he talks to the 10-year-old Piero, it’s about engines. When he talks to the grave of Dino, it’s about the business. (“Cuoghi wants to meet,†he says to the walls in his son’s mausoleum, as if conferring with an assistant.)
“There is no condition. You have the money,†Laura now repeats. “But it is my wish — for my grief for our son, for the years building this, you do not acknowledge the boy with the name Ferrari while I am alive.†When we first hear this, it might seem like a petty request on her part, and a weirdly small note to end this film on. From a spectacular crash to this odd, quiet, tense exchange between husband and wife about a child’s name. Where is the longed-for emotional escalation?
But think back to the earlier sequence when Laura discovered Lina’s and Piero’s existence, thanks to a gaffe by one of Enzo’s bankers. In that scene, Laura wanders the grounds of Lina’s house and happens upon a small toy car sitting on the stoop. Seeing that, she understands that a young boy, presumably Enzo’s, also lives there. As Laura holds the car tenderly in her hands, we see, in close-up, that it’s an old toy, its paint wearing away on the sides. And then we realize: This was Dino’s car. It is at this moment that Laura understands that the young and very much alive Piero is replacing the deceased Dino in Enzo’s heart. (Later, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rack-focus, we will see that she has brought the car back home and put it on a shelf in her room.)
Throughout the film, Mann has shown Laura imprisoned in her grief: Cruz is often shot head-on, a shadow across her face, her black hair a curtain of sorrow. “We never really see the sun in the Ferrari house,†Messerschmidt says, in stark contrast to the soft, gentle light that permeates Lina Lardi’s home. We understand that Laura will never really be able to move forward from her loss. Nor does she want to. When she visits Dino’s grave, she stares at it with a mixture of joy and sadness, almost as if she were looking at an actual person, as if the boy might still be alive. And maybe he is, in a way. Dino is a presence in Laura’s life, even though he’s dead. And for her, to give Piero the name Ferrari would be the final erasure of her son from the face of the earth.
This is one of the essences of Mann’s cinema. Having worked in genre television for years, he has an intuitive understanding of narrative conventions, so his movies often hit many of the beats that tell us we’re watching something somewhat familiar — but then he swerves away in dramatic ways that sometimes frustrate viewers, at least initially. The cops-and-robbers procedural of Heat becomes a vast, multi-character fresco, Dickensian in scope. The undercover thriller Miami Vice becomes a swooning, drifting romance. The cyberthriller Blackhat becomes a rumination on grids both planetary and microscopic. And now, the racing picture Ferrari becomes an intimate tale of parental grief.
Listen closely to the final lines, and you can actually hear the sound levels rise as the camera closes in on Cruz’s face. “The camera was moving in pretty tight, so we definitely went in tight on that and pushed and pushed,†says Andy Nelson, Ferrari’s sound re-recording mixer. It’s an odd effect that seems to go against the dictates of slick moviemaking, but in Mann’s films, the rough edges are often where the poetry lies. “Interestingly enough, the recording at that very moment was just the tiniest bit scratchy sounding,†says Nelson, “but Penelope’s performance was so stunning that we lived with the imperfections because it was a perfect rendition of it.â€
That scratchiness perhaps enhances the idea that Laura’s words come from somewhere deep and primal. It is my wish. Mann says this line, and the way Cruz utters it remind him of something almost prehistorical. “It’s like it comes from a primitive, North Italian tribe,†he says. “It’s pre–Judeo-Christian, pre-Roman.†And her connection to Enzo right now is different too. “Everything has been a negotiation, everything has been a transaction up to this moment,†Mann observes. “But now she’s saying, ‘You decide. You think through what this decision is to be.’ He chooses to say ‘yes’ from just a complete free will.â€
The director has said that one of the elements that drew him to Ferrari was the unreconciled quality of Enzo’s life and career. “We all carry things that are in opposition to each other. And they don’t get resolved. They get resolved in archetypal dramas that we craft,†he says. “How do these oppositions end in most of our lives? We sit around in a BarcaLounger, or watching daytime TV, and then we die — they don’t get resolved.†Thus, Ferrari doesn’t end on some neat moment of catharsis or closure or self-realization. Ferrari is cleared of culpability in the crash at Guidizzolo, but that doesn’t make the incident any less horrific, nor does it clear Enzo spiritually. We are forced to hold all these contradictory ideas in suspension. He is a great racing impresario. He builds beautiful machines. And those machines can and will kill people, especially the way he asks that they be driven. His marriage to Laura will continue, even as Lina and Piero will come to Modena to live with him. He loves Laura on some level, but he also despises her — and she him. As Enzo himself puts it at one point, “Nothing is resolved.†But life goes on.
Yet there is some kind of hope in the film’s very final scene. As Enzo arrives at the cemetery for his daily visit to Dino’s grave, he finds young Piero waiting for him. Despite the horrors that have just occurred, the boy seems oblivious; he even asks if Enzo finally got de Portago’s autograph. For Enzo, the people in his life have all orbited the racing business; that was his way of moving forward. But now, here’s an indication that Piero will finally be family. “Come, I’ll introduce you to your brother,†Enzo says. “I wish you could have known him. He would have taken you with him everywhere.â€
To Mann, these words reflect an element of Enzo’s own youth. “The origins of this line are that Enzo himself went everywhere with his older brother,†the director says. “They were very, very close.†(That brother also died at a young age, during World War I.) And now, we might wonder if Laura’s wish has ironically redeemed Enzo to some degree, at least a little bit. By denying Piero the name Ferrari, she has prompted Enzo to become a more attentive father, inspiring him to bring the child into the fold in other ways. “The way I wanted it to work is that he totally acknowledges Piero as his son in ways he hadn’t before,†Mann says. Enzo has never really allowed himself to be seen as vulnerable up until now. When he visited Dino’s grave, he did so alone. But now, he’s letting someone else in. Maybe this, too, is a way of ensuring that both Dino and the Ferrari name will live on. His worlds may remain unreconciled and unresolved, but maybe they can now coexist.
More From This Series
- Presenting the First Annual ‘Bunch of Boys’ Awards
- Ferrari’s Slow-Motion Crash in Nine Steps
- Can Anyone Stop Oppenheimer at the Oscars?