Courtesy of NEON.

Ferrari

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Michael Mann

Ferrari, Michael Mann’s first film in eight years, begins with a sequence that I’m fairly sure is without precedent in his oeuvre. It is a prologue that captures Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver)’s lesser-known beginnings as a racecar driver, made to look akin to a silent film (within the confines of Mann’s usual Scope frames). At least some of these images appear to be archival from the early 1920s, as cars barrel down at great speed and sometimes smash into each other as spectators eagerly look on. But a few images stick out: those that distinctively have Driver within the frame. It isn’t just his status as the star of the film or the oft-commented-upon odd (and very modern) appearance of his visage that “take” the viewer out of the action of the film: it is the introduction of what may be green-screen or some other form of visual effects to emulate images taken likely a full century before. The result is something thoroughly uncanny, not unlike the emulated photographs of the era in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, but Mann’s heightened artifice (and lower budget) take things a step further: it becomes difficult to establish what belongs to then and what is inextricable from now.

Mann’s period films since the turn of the century and his switch to digital have often flirted with such concepts, from the startling insertions of digital footage of Will Smith as Ali jogging at night to the full-on, never not galvanizing HD cinematography in Public Enemies right at the cusp of its widespread adoption. But it’s worth enumerating the many ways Ferrari differs from virtually all of his past works, even as it remains to be seen whether this is a full-on creative reset for the octogenarian or simply a one-off moment of exploration. For one, this is the first film of his (with the exception of The Keep) that doesn’t take more than a quick stop in a major city. Set almost entirely within the city of Modena, Italy (population ~185,000), where Ferrari lived and made his work, it feels like a provincial town when stacked up against Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and the other metropolises that have populated his work, especially since Ferrari is such a dominant figure, either employing or begrudgingly enjoying notoriety from seemingly every person on screen.

For another, this is the first Mann film where the protagonist is not the main participant in the “action” of the film. Ferrari’s frequent moniker Il Commendatore (“The Commander”) cuts both ways: he wields an enormous amount of influence over how his men and cars behave, who’s in contention, and so on and so forth, but after the prologue—which pointedly comes before both the title card and intertitles explaining his situation at the beginning of the film—his driving is confined to the strictly quotidian, including most prominently his covert shuttling between his residences housing his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) and his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and son out of wedlock. For a Mann protagonist to no longer have access to the juice is a strange sensation, but one that is a) leavened by Driver and Mann’s customarily dynamic engagement with their material and b) in keeping with the different perspective that Mann adopts from his past work.

As scripted posthumously by Troy Kennedy Martin, Ferrari‘s narrative compression into a couple of weeks in 1957, as opposed to the grand sweep of past Mann biopics, applies doubly towards the juggling of his two home lives and his work stresses. As illustrated most vividly in an early scene where Ferrari and his employees time rival Maserati’s attempt at a record while across town at morning mass, the private and public things that must be done all flow into one continuous sense of drive, something which applies just as much to the commander as it does to his underlings. Ferrari, in explaining the competitive will to beat the other driver, utters the key quote of the film that “two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment of the time,” and indeed Mann’s films have always been a question of focus, of shutting out other considerations in any given moment to focus on the task at hand. Whether Ferrari is facing off against his wife for control of the company built together, or wrestling with Lina’s request for public acknowledgment of their child, he (and Mann) approaches it with the same level of hard-nosed negotiation and unerring pragmatism that he does a neck-and-neck race.

Ferrari ultimately builds to a cataclysmic bloodshed, putting a capstone on the death drive encapsulated by the media’s characterization of our Man as a “Saturn devouring his children,” and it’s oddly fitting that this film of constant motion just stops, recalling the deliberately incomplete All the President’s Men as strangely as its cemetery-set final scene is reminiscent of Elle. Other Mann films, most of all his most recent Blackhat, culminate with a certain transcendence, a triumphal act of physical and emotional boundary-pushing (Ali, Collateral) or an escape in life or death for at least one part of a coupling (Miami Vice, Heat, Public Enemies). But here, in a society and culture where everybody knows his name, Ferrari has no choice but to press on.