This year due to a plethora of reasons has ended up one where many of our great film-makers and many of my favourite film-makers released a film and in multiple cases these were films for which they were circling for some time. Once such case where one of our great filmmakers and one of my favourites finally got to make a passion project of his was that of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, a project in this current iteration that has been worked on for so long by Mann that the original script of Troy Kennedy Martin adapting Brock Yate’s book The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine, has outlived its writer with Martin passing in 2009. The film finally arrives in this incredibly stacked 2023 season and with a casting of Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz and Mann back on particularly high form, one could hazard to say that this is the best version of Ferrari that we could have ever got from Mann.
Mann is a filmmaker who like so many of the great craftsman of his era is often critically bullied shall we say for his depictions of human dramas against their truly astounding spectacles of sequence, now this is a particular criticism of his that I have never for one fallen in line with. De Niro’s McCaulley enquiring about his ‘book about metals’ is funny but also the relationship is pulled off by the end that makes the whole film effective, I feel much the same with Tuesday Weld and James Caan in Thief, and in so many ways I feel that Ferrari is the first film where once again I have something to point towards to show Mann’s effectiveness with this sort of storytelling whilst also having something to point towards to help his detractors. I bring these elements up first because I don’t think it shall or should surprise anybody to find out that this film has some of the most well-directed sequences of the year, not just when it comes to the cars, but many other such extended sequences aswell. Mann is on incredible form here, working with the brilliant work of editor Pietro Scalia and the cinematography of Erik Messerschmidt, including one scene in particular near the end of the film that is by far the most shocking thing I saw on screen this year – such a pivotal and well conceived moment of film that is as sudden and terrifying as anything in any horror this season, if not more, aswell as being the exact moment to point to for those who quibble with the CGI in this film (not that it is a sequence of course one would wish to go frame by frame with). Above all Mann excels in this film by creating a thrilling tangibility to the proceedings.
But as a I
eluded to prior, it is the emotional moments of the film that give it much of
its strength this time around. Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz, it is by no
surprising to say are truly both incredible here and both in different ways
that they have been before whilst still monopolising on their greatest
strengths of stoicism, power in the frame and their deep, believable wells of
pained sadness. Driver is of course in the fold of the many Mann figures we can
point to prior, in the hall of fame of quiet, stoic craftsman and workers who
go about their days with the intensity of an earthquake within them, but Driver
in this film for me added a depth more passion and emotional pathos that made
him as a leading man role with a whole film around him a harder job than
perhaps other Mann males. But Cruz may very well be the standout one must
admit. She is sublime at every turn, adding conviction, energy and an
astounding emotionality to a role that so often would be dismissed as simply
‘the put-upon embittered wife’. She is put-upon and she is embittered, but
neither is she anachronistically powerful. Cruz has bouts of incredibly
entertaining and equal parts effecting outbursts, but so much of the film has already
been spent viewing in her the deflated and eroded aftermath of pain. In both
cases its stunning work. However as I again eluded to prior, the film too
features Shailene Woodley in a sub-plot and a character that I’m not sure she
pulled off for me at all, her scenes felt entirely forced in her hands and the
whole thing lacked the pain and power of the Cruz scenes in particular. It’s
the exact sort of thing Mann detractors can point to as evidence, whilst
ignoring of course all the many other things that make him remain one of our
finest film-makers.
A confined, tense and genuinely shocking 8/10 whose nerve is impeccable and whose craft is insane. Mann goes the route of the enclosed biopic with the film following around about a couple of months or so and in that creates an immense world of tension and efficiency that gives the film the engine to be the thrilling and deeply moving at times film that it is. Again one thinks of Maestro and it’s own diversions from the typical biopic formula – if all biopics were like this then they wouldn’t have a bad name. Driver and Cruz are truly incredible here and both do incredible jobs at elevating somewhat standard characters that could be beleaguered with tropes. But Ferrari is far from beleaguered, it frequently excels, if not for it’s full run-time, certainly for many, many sequences.
P.S. Not to be rude Michael, but what the hell was that opening black and white moment? For a film that has such brilliant use of CGI and practical effects as it goes on, could we not for one moment just get a Driver look-alike or something that looked slightly less gimmicky, or for that matter just leave the original footage unaltered. When it’s your very, very opening shots it can set a weary tone for the upcoming film.
P.P.S. After finding out about Patrick Dempsey’s love for motor racing aswell, can we please – not to be rude to the Brad Pitt and Joseph Kosinski project – work on something with Patrick Dempsey and Michael Fassbender and all of the other actors who secretly or not so secretly have a great love for car racing. If only we had the grandfather of them all Paul Newman to appear. For that matter can we get Dempsey in more things in general?
- - Thomas Carruthers
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