Ferrari

I give up racing forever on Monday. I’m back racing by Sunday. We all know it’s our deadly passion. Our terrible joy. Two hours and eleven minutes of Michael Mann dancing around with all the old, familiar skeletons in his closet. I really would love to peek into his mind and see what has spurred his now career-long fixation on the way masculinity tears men apart, on men who internalize all their grief and inner turmoil as drive towards their obsessions. About men who try their damndest to combat these obsessions and these fatal flaws by surrounding themselves with a false sense of normalcy, by trying to be family men to cope with the atrocities they surround themselves with. Ferrari reminds me most immediately of Heat and Thief; Adam Driver’s Enzo Ferrari is the quintessential Mann protagonist. Driver himself is an actor who is almost tailor made to be a Mann lead. He towers over every scene in which he is on frame, with a fittingly stoic performance that works as an effective mask for the oceanic wall of emotion threatening to spill out at any given moment. Not unlike James Caan’s Frank or Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna, he is a man of his profession, a man who has conditioned himself to handle whatever comes at him. To deny himself of the release of his emotion. And just like those men, he’s got the fatal flaw of loving somebody. Penelope Cruz is also a very prototypical Mann woman, particularly reminding me of Justine Hanna. A rejected, disillusioned and embittered woman who can only endure so many kicks to the teeth, from a man who runs away at every moment’s notice. The whole thing is just very much so drenched in this heavy storm cloud of strain and obsession and resentment and grief. Ferrari is repeatedly faced with the horrific deaths of so many people that he has invested time and care into, but they come after he’s already recuperated from the ultimate loss a man can endure. He can’t acknowledge the finality of death if he can contextualize it as something that comes in the pursuit of triumph. And Mann does a lot to make you, if not understand, at least grasp why it’s such a grand pursuit. White knuckle intensity backdropped by the roar of an engine and gritty, gorgeous high octane racing (your shitty complaints about brief CGI be damned) with some of the most egregious levels of cinematic anxiety you will ever feel thanks to the picture’s deliberate, carefully pieced together pacing. Also worth noting that Ferrari has an ending sequence that strikes me as the most optimistic of almost anything I’ve seen out of Mann’s work thus far, showing a hint of promise rather than a sense of confinement. It’s a lot of movie, and a thunderous one at that. A digitally photographed biopic as only Michael Mann could deliver it. If he really gets around to that Heat sequel (the novel version of which I’m currently reading), I will be seated there on night one. But if this was his final film, I could respect so much just how full circle this really is for him and his work.