Ferrari

“And I see you, too. Every moment I close my eyes. Your face, I want to see.**” Last year, Martin Scorsese very openly discussed how being so deep into his twilight years impacted his relationship and his process with creating art. I remember very vividly reading one of our greatest living visionaries using the phrase “I’m old, I read things, I want to tell stories. But there’s no more time.” And I can also remember, around the same time, when Michael Mann was faced with the exact same subject, he very bluntly seemed to shrug it all off. I believe his exact words were that he doesn’t have time to think about mortality, because he’s busy. If he’s telling the truth, I’d love to know where he is able to separate his art from his life because Ferrari is so intrinsically and intensely fixated on death, grief, loss and pain that it threatens to overwhelm you. Even the concept of the race is framed less as a sport and more like a fatalistic gauntlet where dying in a flaming heap of contorted metal is almost like a grim eventuality. Seeing it again, what was already a film that I knew I loved is one that I think is a late period masterpiece. Alarming how it’s evolved from simply being a solid entry in a great filmmaker’s catalogue into being one of his most essential works, if you ask me. So much of what Mann has built his legend on is present here and yet it feels appropriately aged, like it’s being examined through the lens of an artist who has had four decades to hone his craft and to refine his expression. Ferrari is, in ways both subtextually and explicitly, an opera. A great tragedy. Adam Driver is remarkably towering and all consuming as a man who, at the time, was very nearly sixty years old and already rather acquainted with the concept of death. His Enzo Ferrari is almost exactly the archetypal Mann Protagonist: a man who is most in harmony with one thing and one thing only, trying to separate the two lives that he’s living, leaving a vast trail of wreckage behind him. A father who has lost one son, offered up a dozen prodigal ones as lambs to the slaughter and currently tries to shield one from the world he occupies. There are moments where it’s hard not to feel your heart break for him. The scene where he comes to visit his son in their family tomb and that wall he’s talked about building crumbles, and he’s left with the void in his soul that manifests itself in raw tears and hot pink flushing across his face leaves me feeling like there’s a hole in my chest every time. But it’s this way he very mechanically writes off the men who die building his empire, the way he justifies it by enamoring them with an unreasonable drive to win at all costs, and you realize he’s a ghoul in many ways. A prisoner to himself. What’s more blood on your hands after so much has already been spilled? The intercutting between Ferrari in church and the roar of the engine and his team tirelessly working on their newest racing machine is as plain but as riveting a framing device as you could ask for. The only god Enzo believes in is the one that has given him a life, given him power and given him purpose: the one that he created. Even though it’s almost as if the one he’s turned his back to is routinely punishing him, ripping away so many people that he loves. Mann’s fascination on masculinity and the shackles that men place on themselves because of some ultra vain desire to conquer and to be the masters of their own universe has been a through line within his entire catalogue and Ferrari feels quintessential because of that. It feels like a more informed, updated rendition of so much of his sensibilities and his obsessions. This is most evident in the agency that he assigns to Penelope Cruz and Shailene Woodley as the two women who have the nature of their lives inarguably tied to Enzo Ferrari, but they refuse to let him shape who they are. It would be easy to think of Cruz’s Laura as a vindictive figure but Mann chooses to hammer home the abandonment she feels by the man she once loved. Explores what horrific damage the death of a child can do to love. There are moments where you can see that there is a fire that burns within the both of that only burns for the other. It feels more like the flames of what used to be a raging inferno, dwindling down to the embers. It’s all carnal desire and an implosion of tension, but it’s replaced by such cruel words and betrayal. It paints his relationship with Lina in such a complicated light. There is a tenderness that he shares with her, a sense of genuine warmth and vulnerability that nobody else in the film ever sees from him. It endears, on some level, him to you and shows you that he is capable of love and humanity. But then you remember that he made a choice to take those gestures away from somebody he once promised himself to. There’s a sense of very real, imperfect humanity in Mann’s films that I always find fascinating. People fighting uphill battles and refusing to stop pushing the boulder. Early on in the film, Ferrari talks about a twilight of perpetual failure. And that’s largely what seems to be happening here. Turmoil with his wife, growing impatience with the mother of his second child, deaths of his drivers. Even something as simple as acquiring an autograph for his son is a task he repeatedly fails to accomplish. Mann commits for so long to this vision of agony and of despair and lets the film feel so bleak, like the horrible and quiet minutes after a relationship-altering fight, that it makes his decision to end the film on such a tender and loving gesture absolutely shattering. There are moments here that make me want to cry, others that feel like a lightning bolt to your spine. Those snapping camera bulbs, the way the road and the forest blends together into a tunnel, the serenity of the Italian countryside. It’s a beautiful, melancholy film that dares to end on such a bittersweet final note. One that seems to suggest that love can conquer all, but can that love survive a heart that refuses to acknowledge its sins? “Fuck it, we both die.”