Ferrari - Passion; Destruction
Thoughts On: Ferrari (2023)
On the brink of collapse, Enzo Ferrari attempts to keep his family and business in tact.
Engaging and at points tense, Ferrari is a pretty good film - though quite certainly forgettable. While I enjoyed it, I don't see myself watching it again. But, it remains a respectable effort from Michael Mann constructed upon some fine storytelling, characterisation and race sequences. Noting spectacular, but nothing to be scoffed at, Ferrari hasn't got too much to fault. I personally would have been more interested in seeing - or rather, hearing - this in actual Italian with Italian actors. It simply feels inauthentic and slightly soulless with Italian accents, which is not to say that Driver and co provide sub-par performances; the aesthetic is simply off. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Ferrari is the actual aesthetic itself actually. I have been driven down much of the route of the Mille Miglia (the main race featured in the film), from France, through Turin and down to Rome. Italy has an incredible landscape that Mann, in my view, fails entirely to represent cinematically. With this being a period piece, I can envision how difficult it would be to capture large sections of the modern landscape without cracking verisimilitude, but so much of this film could have been landscape porn and it isn't. And such leaves Ferrari disappointingly American, leaving me to wonder why this story was chosen to be adapted by the Americans for anything other than commercial reasons.
My aesthetic criticisms aside, what makes Ferrari work is its characters and its presentation of the idea that passion resides at the edge of destruction. There are some sudden jumps in this film towards brutality and heartlessness; and this is interplayed between the action with the cars and the familial drama. And all coalesce to transmit the passion of the story of Ferrari quite affectively. For this, I would certainly recommend the film, but, again, wouldn't expect anyone to really want to watch this twice.
