Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Patrick Dempsey, Jack O’Connell
Intro:
The scenes between Driver and Cruz are well written and acted, and are easily the best in the film.
Who doesn’t love Italian sports cars? They are synonymous with sleek style, fast driving and even faster women. Well, maybe that latter part of the phrase is a bit dated, but then this latest offering from the great American director Michael Mann is set in the late 1950s with the sexual politics of that era.
The film certainly doesn’t shy away from the idea that car racing, sex and glamour are strongly linked. However, Mann’s film is as much concerned with family and marriage problems as it is with the iconic marque itself. What anchors the whole thing is that fact that the Ferrari is (or was) a family firm and its main protagonist Enzo Ferrari was himself a popular race driver. Race drivers, like Matadors seem to be assured of a female fan base.
Enzo is played by Adam Driver who uses his tall, good looks to great effect. He certainly scrubs up well for the part with his sleek grey hair and his fashionable sunglasses. He is more than just a clothes horse though, and Driver [born to play the role in name alone], who is in almost every shot, works hard to draw us into the protagonist’s troubled inner life. Again, true to the era (if not the country), Enzo has a mistress (a slightly oddly-cast and not in the least Italian-seeming Shailene Woodley) and he spends quite a lot of time brooding about how he can placate his justifiably suspicious wife Laura (Penelope Cruz in fine form) happy. Enzo knows about cars, but we feel that it is Laura who is the business brain. When the wheels fall off – so to speak – it is Laura who tells him how to make strategic decisions. The scenes between Driver and Cruz are well written and acted, and are easily the best in the film. The script was by legendary Scottish-born screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job), and he gets a valedictory credit at the end.
Mann makes good use of the Ferraris’ mansion, and stunning designer décor, which is held against travelogue-worthy shots of the Umbrian countryside. However, he skirts just short of overdoing the Italianess of it all. We don’t get too much talk of pasta and wine and Catholic churches, though all of these elements feature a little.
Then there is the actual racing element. This is where the film has to speak to two audiences; a balancing act that it largely pulls off. It is clearly indicated in the script that the success of the badge (to say nothing of the need to attract enough money for car production) depends upon actually winning races. So, we have to have quite a few racing sequences in which the dinky little red cars zip around winding Italian roads, albeit at speeds which today would probably be ok for the middle lane of an Australian motorway. But Mann revs up (whoops) the soundtrack and gets the camera in tight. Even though we can’t easily distinguish one car from another, the action scenes are exciting enough.
Whether the people who like cars will find the domestic drama exciting enough and whether the other audience can be made to care about the races is an open question. Mann has made a dozen very fine films in a long and distinguished career, so at least we can feel safe that he is behind the wheel (sorry).
