I could be looking at my shoe, or maybe at yours.
dir: Michael Mann
2023
Since I’ve gotten to watch and review all of the flicks that were nominated for stuff at the Academy Awards, and the awards themselves have been and gone, now I’m sort-of at the wrap up stage for last year, reviewing the flicks that weren’t nominated for squat, but you can just tell these flicks were sold to their stars by their agents as “you’ll definitely get nominated for this!”
Long way of saying “Oscarbait”. With Director Michael Mann, chronicler of hard men doing difficult stuff without changing their facial expressions. With Adam Driver, who maybe isn’t the biggest chameleon out there, but who definitely delivers intense performances when required.
And what’s it about? Ferrari. Not the car, but the man. Enzo Ferrari.
And what a man. Even wearing pants that he pulls up to his armpits, even in late middle-age, he radiates Italian cool. Sunglasses all the time, night or day, like he’s Marcello Mastroianni, only cooler. He has the poise, the confidence of a man who has faced death behind the wheel of a car going as fast as cars can go at that time, and won.
He’s so self-possessed it’s almost irritating, like, you almost want to do something shocking just to see if he’ll flinch.
After getting up from his lover’s bed, and eventually getting home, his angry wife (Penelope Cruz) fires a bullet from a gun at his head, near his head. He doesn’t flinch.
He’s just too fucking cool to flinch. That doesn’t mean he’s got everything under control, though.
Far from it. His company, the one that makes cars, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, presumably because he doesn’t really care so much about the manufacturing and selling of cars aspect of his business. He only cares about the racing part of his business.
There is a track record that his cars have, that he dreads having his competitors break. If they break it, and they do, well, he has to yell at one of his drivers to drive faster, and get the record back.
If the driver dies while trying to break the record again, well, Enzo is not going to cry any tears over him.
One of the fundamental aspects of what people are referring to when they talk about toxic masculinity, a phrase which, I agree, is bandied about so often that it loses all meaning, is that quite often in cinema men, manly men, don’t get to display a full range of healthy emotions in response to whatever setbacks or tragedies they face over the course of a movie. Movies marketed mostly to men will often only allow for one safe emotion for a man to emote on screen – rage. Anger. Only anger. That’s why so many films have revenge as the entire motivating energy behind the whole endeavour.
What does that tell men, or especially younger men, prone as they are to sheep like herd mentality group dynamics? It tells them it’s not only okay to remain emotionally immature, or stunted, it’s in fact preferable and makes you tall and desirable and will give you a more prominent chin even.
Come on. That’s not healthy, but at least this isn’t a flick where someone kills a thousand people and dies so they don’t have to face any consequences.
Enzo, visiting the elaborate tomb of his dead son, sheds a tear (the singular tear he will shed in the entire film), and tells him not only that he misses him, but he even smiles in remembrance of him.
The rest of the time? Not so much. Talking to someone else, he mentions a wall he built up himself after the deaths of two other drivers he was close to; though he remembers their deaths every day, he cannot afford to let himself be overwhelmed by emotion. He has to keep making decisions, and keep moving, to stay on top of his world. It’s not so much stoicism so much as it’s “never let ‘em see you sweat”.
There are easy parallels that one can make about certain scenes. I’m not going to use the word, the really obvious one people tend to use, especially when talking about something set in Italy, in the 1950s. That’s not the association I want to make. But it’s hard at least not to see Enzo as a regal figure, as someone in charge of a kingdom that’s in danger. Italy was, for most of its time before it was Italy, made up of city-states, led by princes, or far away kings. These kinds of princes, immortalised by Niccolo Machiavelli in his treatise on how princes like the Medicis and the Borgias should lead, wielded power like a naked blade, and Ferrari is nothing if not a dynamic leader.
He lies. He manipulates. He gives the appearance of generosity when it suits, of stinginess at others. There’s even a section where he discusses with his wife, who’s no less of a ruthless leader, the bribes they’ll have to make in order to smooth their way back to solvency after a crisis. He is ruthless, and has no qualms about sending men to their deaths in the service of his ambitions.
He pushes his drivers knowing the risks, and when more of them die, or even worse, take a whole bunch of bystanders with them (in a devastating and completely unexpected scene, if you know nothing about the history of the car race depicted here), he is unmoved – it’s just another logistical or public relations problem to solve.
Because that’s how he thinks, like a driver, like an engineer. Any problem, no matter how complex, can be solved if you know everything relevant and approach the problem from the correct angle.
That’s why his wife Laura (Cruz) blames him for their son Dino’s death, at the age of 24, to muscular dystrophy, because he approached the problem like an engineer, arrogantly believing he could somehow fix their son, like it was within his power. Such arrogance led him to promise that their son would never die.
No wonder she hates him so much. Beyond the routine marital betrayals with countless women (allora, what’s a successful Italian pants man gonna do, na cifra?), and the fact that he has another family on the side, she loathes him for not saving their son. It’s not posited as rational; he admits his arrogance made him promise something that he should not have. But he’s also not a man who expresses regrets. Every scene he has with Cruz is electric, but what else would you expect? They’re both at the top of their game.
His scenes with Shailene Woodley, playing his mistress and eventual partner? Not so much. It’s something of a thankless role, because she doesn’t get to do or say much of importance.
But Cruz, my gods. If you could bottle the energy she brings to the role and fuel a car with it, you’d win a thousand Grand Prixes. It’s funny to me that they take one of the most talented and beautiful actors that European cinema has ever produced, and to dress her down and make her look somewhat dowdy, the only thing they do is not let her wear colourful lipstick. That’s it, that’s all they dared. in total, how else or why else would you fuck with perfection?
It's Driver’s flick, no doubt. There are other characters, but they are mostly courtiers to their monarch. The dynamic with his drivers, with his mechanics and his engineers, it’s well realised, really well realised. There’s a camaraderie that they get across in his interactions with them. You sense that he has tremendous respect for them, and they for him, because they’ve put their lives on the line, balls to the wall, pedal to the floor, and they’re still here. There’s still a distance, though.
Patrick Dempsey, which is a name I never thought I’d be writing in a review of mine, solely because I’ve never watched Grey’s Anatomy and have no idea who McDreamy is or was, plays one of Ferrari’s drivers, a veteran one that’s called Piero Taruffi. And it’s not so much his acting that one would single out, so much as the shock of white hair that he sports. It’s a remarkable look, really has to be seen to be believed.
Ferrari often berates him, at one point yelling at him that he’s a geriatric, and that if he loses, his wife and children will never speak to him again out of shame, which is, come on, man, that’s a bit rough.
But he clearly respects the guy, because he gets results. He may have hair that looks like it’s constructed from two minute noodles (ramen to the rest of you), but he gets results. He’s the silver-haired champion of European racing.
Why does the racing, or the races matter? Well, it doesn’t matter to me, but as Ferrari explains, he lives for the racing part of his business, not so much for the car manufacturing part (the one that keeps the company afloat). He wants to win in order to win. WIN. In theory if they win races, demand for their production cars increases, but he doesn’t care about that so much (which is presumably why they’re in such dire straits financially).
It set up to seem like the grand car race, the Mille Miglia, or “thousand miles” that its outcome will determine all their futures. It is a lie, a bald-faced one at that. It really feels like it matters, and the race itself is depicted in a physical and visceral manner, with a lot of actual cars racing (and probably a bunch of CGI as well). But it’s a testament to the determination of the production to get it to feel like there is something real at stake, and that winning and surviving are not guaranteed for anyone.
What happens, win or lose, is somewhat, surprisingly, anti-climactic. Something utterly terrible happens, shocking and horrific, but it’s just another obstacle to face. In the end we understand: Enzo Ferrari will eventually get his way, no matter who or what, because he’s just that powerful. He will power through everything, and you’ll either be pulled along with him, or drown in his wake.
Look, I’m hardly going to make the argument that this flick doesn’t seem absurd on the face of it. Adam Driver is not Italian. He doesn’t speak Italian, though he puts on an adorable accent, which I believe is meant to be Italian. So, famously Italian (not at all) as the lead, famously Italian (Spanish) actor as his wife, famously Italian (entirely American) actor playing his mistress, Italians mostly in supporting roles, all in a film set in 1957 Italy, in the region of Modena, in which no-one speaks a word of Italian? Not even a curse word or a vafancullo or even a che cazzo fai?
Damn. That’s harsh. No wonder Italians boycotted this flick en masse (I have no idea if that’s true). This is a beautifully made flick, very traditional, maybe it’s for people who care about famous car manufacturers or the history of car racing. I don’t give the slightest of fucks for either of those things, and greet anything to do with luxury cars or Formula 1 car racing with indifference at best and radical class loathing at worst. But I found this compelling. Adam Driver does everything he does with conviction. It doesn’t always work, it doesn’t always make a film enjoyable, but he’s compelling, and to me at least in this flick he nailed it, he absolutely nailed it. I found this far more interesting and enjoyable to watch compared to the flick I saw before it, being another film about an arrogant jerk who had a terrible impact on many European lives. This was way better than Napoleon.
There are a bunch of strong scenes (any time Penelope Cruz was onscreen qualifies), but I have to say my favourite construction, cross cut scene was a number of people all watching the same opera, or listening to it, being the Parigi, o cara duet from La Traviata. Everyone listening to it draws a different meaning from it. And though we only get to see the memories of the characters we know, I’m pretty sure if we peered into the minds of the other opera goers, they too would have been thinking about their happiest memories of Enzo Ferrari.
Italy looks magnificent in so many shots, of Modena, of Brescia and surrounds, the famous town of Maranello, where the headquarters remains of this stupid car factory. The women look exquisite, the men look cool or useful, or both. The cars, madonna mia, some of those older red racing cars have curves on them that look like they were modelled on Sophia Loren herself. The racing looks amazing, visceral, primitive and deadly.
But it all comes down to the people. The commandatore, as they all refer to Enzo Ferrari, the commander of all these people, loyal or not, who are bound to him and his driver. It’s hard not to get dragged along with him.
9 times car racing of that era looks so easy oh fuck I blinked we’re all dead out of 10
--
“Behra pulls up next to you, challenging. You're even. But two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time. Behra doesn't lift. The corner races at you. You have perhaps a crisis of identity: "Am I a sportsman or a competitor? How will the French think of me if I run Behra into a tree?" You lift, he passes. He won, you lost! Because at that same moment, Behra thought, "Fuck it, we both die." – this is not a pep talk, commandatore, Ferrari
- 142 reads