Michael Mann doesn’t make traditional biopics. And the genre is all the better for it, argues Josh Slater-Williams, assessing Ferrari in the context of the director’s previous real-life tales and lauded crime sagas.
With such enduring films as Heat (1995), Thief (1981), Collateral (2004) and Manhunter (1986) under his belt, director Michael Mann is perhaps most widely known as a chronicler of the blurred lines separating criminals and the people or forces standing in their way. But to reduce Mann’s legacy to just cops-and-killers stories is to do a disservice to an altogether more varied filmography. For one thing, period action movie The Last of the Mohicans (1992) remains one of his biggest commercial successes, adjusted for inflation. Furthermore, as exemplified by his latest feature Ferrari (2023), Mann is also one of modern American cinema’s most fascinating storytellers when it comes to depicting real-life events and conflicts.
Ferrari (2023)
Focusing on one eventful summer, Ferrari is primarily a portrait of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver, stoic but magnetic), the Italian motor-racing-driver-turned-entrepreneur who ran his car business with fiery wife Laura (Penélope Cruz). In 1957, their factory verges on bankruptcy, with Enzo’s racing team losing out to archrival Maserati. At the same time as this financial turbulence, husband and wife are still mourning the recent loss of their little boy, Alfredo (‘Dino’), who died from muscular dystrophy the previous year, for which Laura blames Enzo. Unbeknown to Laura, Enzo has another son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), conceived with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). It is with this second family that we first meet Enzo in the film, establishing a quandary for Enzo about recognising Piero as his own in a legitimate manner. Circling the orbit of this dual family drama are Enzo’s mother, Adalgisa (Daniela Piperno), and the drivers who will race for Ferrari in the famed Mille Miglia event: Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), veteran Piero Taruffi (a silver-foxed Patrick Dempsey) and hotshot newcomer Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone) among them.
Ferrari (2023)
Although the exact nature of the project shifted over time, Michael Mann has had some sort of Ferrari movie in his sights for over 30 years. Centred on a particularly taxing time in its subjects’ lives, the director’s final version is unafraid to portray these people as nuanced humans rather than glorified archetypes, capable of contradictory or bewildering behaviour that can cast them in unflattering lights. And this helps Ferrari stand out in the modern cinematic landscape for this genre of storytelling: one particularly heavy on biopics authorised by artists’ or sportspeople’s estates (or the subjects themselves, when still alive), where almost all edges in a life story are sanded off.
The primary artistic objective with such films can be seen as maintaining a brand image or message above all else. Some recent examples of this hagiographic approach, such as Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), have been notable commercial successes. Many of them have had very poor critical notices, by and large, and quite a few of late – such as Big George Foreman (2023) – have bombed both critically and commercially. The mere suggestion of excessive reverence may now be turning off prospective viewers.
Ferrari (2023)
On that matter of reverence, in a recent career talk in London to promote Ferrari, Mann described meeting Muhammad Ali for the first time, the legendary athlete having approved him as director for his biopic, released in 2001. ‘The first thing he said was, “I’m not interested in hagiography. I’m proud of the mistakes I made, and the trials and tribulations.” He wanted everything in, warts and all. He didn’t want [something] glowing.’ While Mann has known Piero for 25 years (according to an interview for Vulture), the Ferrari heir only ever got directly involved when it came to little details for Driver to portray his father. As Mann said: ‘I wanted him to read the script over many years, and he didn’t want to. He trusted me. In preproduction this time around, he read it and he had things to add. There were a lot of valuable insights, like Enzo never made a cup of coffee for himself in his life. He never shaved himself. What kind of underwear he slept in.’
As in Ali, compelling dramatic territory is found in not shying away from faults and transgressions, such as Enzo’s concealing of his second family and son from Laura. And like with the depiction of boxing, the physical horrors always at risk in the car-racing world are not sugar-coated in Mann’s film. When the notorious Mille Miglia crash comes, it’s staged and edited in such a way that makes it as visceral and shocking as any of the explicit violence from Miami Vice (2006) or Blackhat (2015).
Ferrari (2023)
Mann has never followed that childhood-to-death structure favoured by many a biopic, although 2009’s Public Enemies does end with John Dillinger’s bloody demise. Instead, his real-life portraits hone in on a specific stormy period in the subjects’ lives. They are films less interested in biography, but instead in individual lives as reflections of ideas and the climate of the time. Ferrari is not solely about the literal events of one summer. In addition to bringing these dramas to the screen, Mann uses Ferrari the man as – excuse the pun – a vehicle through which to explore post-war Italy and the attitudes that – excuse another – drove an entire industry. Similarly, while Ali definitely highlights the man’s sporting accomplishments, that film was also just as much about the idea of what Ali (Will Smith) represented, and the importance of him as a symbol in America and around the world. It’s a fascinating look at a man recognising his unique and substantial political capital: attempting to take control of that image from those who wish to govern it, and reconcile with the extent to which that image truly reflects him as an individual.
Ferrari (2023)
Even outside of his biopics, Mann’s films can broadly be classified as explorations of individuals devoting their lives to something larger than themselves, wrestling with the existential dilemmas that come with that terrain they’ve chosen. His protagonists have these larger callings for which they become obsessed and disciplined to a professional level. But even at the top, there’s this overwhelming tension at play where a person can get fully lost in the worlds or structures they’ve been forced into or chosen. This is present in Ferrari just as much as it is in Thief or Heat, where Enzo – a self-actualised man – seeks to push beyond what the current limits are to achieve something great.
Rather than glaring outliers in a filmography filled with crime tales, Mann’s real-life screen sagas are extensions of those same thematic preoccupations and detail-oriented storytelling present in his entirely fictional works. In the case of Ferrari, the relinquishing of a protagonist’s soul and self to a drive just so happens to literally involve cars.
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