FASTEST SKETCH

ENERGIES COMBINED TO DRIVE FILM NARRATIVE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Michael Mann begins with a black and white newsreel of Enzo Ferrari racing cars, and in the process, makes everyone shift gears after noticing the lead actor behind the steering wheel.

Ferrari (2023) begins a few years later though with leading actor Adam Driver setting aside the racing goggles and that youthful appearance for the polarized sunglasses and sweeping gray hair of an established Italian sports car manufacturer.

Mann continues to hold the audience tight inside the narrative device as the camera explores different concepts of beauty beginning with the advancement of time through a montage of landscapes that gets the camera to the 1957 starting line.

Driver portrays Ferrari as a quiet, determined race car engineer using the sale of luxury sportscars to the world elite as a way of financing his passion for racing.

The narrative takes Ferrari through a circuit of events as the personal life narrative is ever so delicately kept apart from the professional race car life narrative, but one seems to be continuously put in imminent peril by the other.

Penelope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari but Laura’s involvement in the beauty of the story is kept a secret for as long as possible as a way of building tension. Laura appears at first only out of necessity as the 50% shareholder who keeps the books and makes the payroll balance.

Laura becomes more and more prominent as the survival of the race car company is revealed to be in as much peril as her marriage.

Driver shows how the big man survives – perhaps being too insensitive to the consequences of his reckless push forward to save the company.

When Enzo’s son with Laura dies, he takes a lover and has a second son out of wedlock. Lina Lardi is played by Shailene Woodley. Woodley performs Lina as quite content in her role as mistress particularly because Enzo spends most of his time at the racetrack or with her and their son, as opposed to time spent with his wife, Laura.

Mann uses the tension in the personal life and the tension in the professional life to compel the narrative forward, and then even more so as he incrementally brings the narratives together more and more, driving the scenes to the final sequence of events involving a cross country race.

This human tension between personalities joins with the kinetic energy of the competing race cars until the ultimate climax.

Mann has already spent the plot reversal in a series of scenes involving a heart to heart discussion between Enzo and Laura. The script seems to synchronize with the narrative much better after the scene sequence and then, with that understanding between the characters moving forward, everything also becomes more beautiful.

The director continues to reveal the cold calculating nature of the ego pressing the drivers and managing the race results seemingly only for his own gratification.

Patrick Dempsey is cast as race car driver Piero Taruffi tasked with winning the Mille Miglia for Ferrari.

Mann gives the drivers a little bit of time on screen to develop characters, but the main focus of the camera is on Driver and the need to illustrate how Ferrari managed the difficult life events against each other almost as second nature.

Driver creates a complex character who was not quite a ruthless business person but perhaps fanatical about racing while also balancing compassion with others and loyalty to family.

While the script has some thoughtful dialogue in support of the cultural dynamics at play, a lot of screen time involves racing and race cars and discussions about preempting possible catastrophic business losses.

Ferrari, with a 2h and 4m runtime, is currently playing in theatres.