A film by Michael Mann
With: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Patrick Dempsey, Jack O’Connell, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Erik Haugen, Michele Savoia, Valentina Bellè
During the summer of 1957, former race car driver, Enzo Ferrari, is in crisis. All the dramatic forces of his life are in collision. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for one son and the acknowledgement of another. Enzo decides to counter his losses by rolling the dice on one race – 1,000 miles across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia.
Our Review: (*)
Much anticipation surrounding Michael Mann‘s new film, with its XXL cast. After House of Gucci and Barbie, we were, as many moviegoers will probably be, curious to see what the marriage between a renowned director with a singular universe and a biography about a man, but above all a brand, could yield. In our opinion, House of Gucci was one of the best films of 2022, with Riddley Scott bringing a great deal of seriousness and mastery to a story that was not lacking in spice. Barbie, on the other hand, is perhaps our greatest misunderstanding of 2023: how could Greta Gerwig‘s independent, personal spirit be so absorbed by the Warner/Mattel machine? To say Ferrari disappointed us would be an understatement… A highly conventional, stereotyped biopic, with Adam Driver constantly overacting and the female roles very stereotyped, the film tends to glorify its hero at face value… Some may object that Michael Mann also brings out a darker side of the character, but the linearity of the story, its ambition to focus on a very limited period of the character, at a time when Ferrari, the brand, is playing for its survival, and the rather abysmal weakness of the screenplay lead by its propensity to take a first-degree interest in motor racing, bore us about as much as a Formula 1 race in which we know the winner in advance. It makes you wonder why this film was selected at all, other than to increase the number of stars on the red carpet