Adam Driver in Ferrari “beats” the House of Gucci

Two years ago, the actor Adam Driver he acted in a highly dramatic film about an important Italian family business, of which he recounted its quarrels and successes, its difficult transition to modernity. The film we are talking about was, of course, House of Guccithe highly anticipated work of Ridley Scottwho was able to describe luxury in the best possible way, but created an unconvincing portrait of the European dynasty.

Now Driver tries his hand at the genre again, with Ferrari Of Michael Mann, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last Thursday. It would seem an ideal context for the debut of the film, because the audience has the opportunity to root for a hero of the country. But being a Mann film, Ferrari does not lend itself to celebrations. It is a more depressed and idiosyncratic work, a study in pride and self-referential male drives, modeled in wholly human dimensions. Definitely better than House of Gucci.

The film takes place in 1957, when the founder Enzo Ferrari is almost 50 years old and in danger of losing his company. Too focused on motor racing, he doesn’t pay much attention to the business side of the business. One reason for this distraction could be the recent death of his son, Dino, struck down by muscular dystrophy at the age of twenty and bitterly mourned by Ferrari and his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), linked by an affection made of respect. Driver, of course, isn’t 50, but a subtle hair and makeup job manages to convince us. And in any case, in the role – taciturn and coldly kind – he gets along so well that the matter of age gladly takes a back seat.

Ferrari is a story divided in two, which finds the balance point between Ferrari’s determination to make one of its cars triumph in the Mille Miglia, a notoriously demanding and dangerous road race (and therefore, hopefully, to give the company a boost crucial to sales), and his complicated private life. He has a lover, Lina (Shailene Woodley), hidden in a country house of which his wife knows nothing, and a young son, Piero, of which Laura knows even less. Throughout the film, Mann ties these threads together leading us towards a possible conclusion and moral: Accepting mistakes and their consequences is the only way forward in life.

At first Mann’s hand is barely visible and this creates a certain disappointment. The coldness that is the director’s hallmark is shaken by the glare of the time, while the dialogues unravel with little panache. But little by little, Mann’s familiar tics reveal themselves: in the dialogues they take a pleasant bite and altitude (Mann co-wrote the screenplay with Troy Kennedy Martin), the bombastic chase scenes are shot with uncompromising vigor and, of course, in sunglasses. Driver wears them as best as possible and Mann prepares an excellent container in which to pour his masculine ease, his competence and his exaggerations, resumed with a resolute grace.

In the film, Mann also lets the women shine. Cruz has more irons in the fire than Woodley – when we first meet Laura, who manages the company’s finances shrewdly, she’s angrily brandishing a gun – but both manage to imbue their characters with an intensity that leads them to worthily flanking the man at the center of the film. Ferrari he is careful to make his characters real: complex and capable of change. The same force of characterization, loaded with personal details, that Mann had already shown us in Challenge. Net of all this nuanced portrait, perhaps Ferrari it’s not a high-impact film like Le Mans ’66 – The great challenge of 2019, but Mann’s work is even more pleasant precisely because of its balance and thoughtfulness.

The cars, however, hurtle towards triumph and, on more than one occasion, towards a horrendous catastrophe. (One incident is particularly gruesome and comes as a shock, it pains to write it, invigorating.) Ferrari, who mourns lost friends with his son, has hardened in the face of this tragedy, but the film does not portray him as an insensitive monster incapable of see beyond the tip of your nose. He merely respects the fact that the men under his command voluntarily took such a risk. The loss is felt, but guilt rarely enters the room. This psychology is analyzed and proposed more than credibly by Mann and Driver, the latter skilled in communicating the pain that dwells somewhere, under an apparent imperturbability.

While Mann has been working with television recently, his latest film was the Curious Blackhat 2015 hacker thriller, perhaps unfairly criticized. The return of Mann’s muscular visions to the big screen has been long awaited, and though Ferrari is perhaps more delicate than some might have hoped, it is a pleasure to see the director grappling with new styles and timbres. Now in his 80s, Mann has made a film that is darker and more contemplative than those of his past. The Ferrari man – who was charged with manslaughter over the accident depicted in the film – is neither revered nor condemned. Perhaps, it is understood, as designed by an old master who knows how to build elegant and sophisticated machines.