Michael Mann distils Enzo Ferrari’s life down to one tumultuous year

FERRARI ★★★½

(MA15+) 130 minutes

The life of Enzo Ferrari, the racing car tycoon, was a saga with many chapters regularly punctuated by sudden reversals of fortune.

How to strip it down to three acts? This biopic by American director Michael Mann – somebody else who likes to take chances - concentrates on a single tumultuous year. It’s 1957 and Ferrari is facing a series of events which will shape the rest of his life.

The Formula 1 Ferrari is already an Italian institution but the cost of its production has brought the company close to collapse and Ferrari’s personal life is in a similar state. His son with his wife, Laura, is dead after a long illness, his marriage is in ruins and he is beginning to feel a need to acknowledge the son he has with his longstanding mistress.

Mann has been obsessed with this story for decades. The film’s script was written more than 15 years ago by the groundbreaking Scottish screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin, who was responsible for the BBC series Edge of Darkness and the classic caper movie The Italian Job – best remembered for the wonders it worked for the reputation of the Mini Cooper S with its playfully unorthodox chase sequences.

A stranger to compromise, Kennedy Martin has done nothing to simplify his account of Ferrari’s business dealings, so it helps if you do a little homework before seeing the film, since there’s as much action in the office as on the track. But whatever the setting, events are dominated by Adam Driver’s Ferrari – a bulky, grey-haired presence who looms over almost every scene with a manner so laconically authoritative that you glean few clues to the churning going on in his head and heart. It’s a performance which effectively answers all those who have criticised Mann for not casting an Italian actor.

His mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), is a serene, self-composed woman who offers him relief from the turmoil governing his marriage to Laura. Played by a volcanic Penelope Cruz, Laura is mired in grief and frustrated to the point of madness by her husband’s indifference to her.

The racing track is Ferrari’s refuge and the gamble he is about to take centres on the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile open-road endurance race across Italy. If the Ferrari team wins, as it has in the past, victory will strengthen his hand in his forthcoming negotiations with Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli, who is interested in taking a stake in the company.

Renowned for his passion for detail, Mann has made himself so familiar with the routines at the track and in the workshop that his characters communicate in a kind of shorthand. They’re immersed in what’s going on, and so was I. Mann has said that it’s not a racing film and in a sense, he’s right. The need to create suspense in the race is not his paramount interest. He’s more intent on plunging you into the complexities of the Ferrari world. The rivalries between the drivers are not pumped up for drama’s sake. Nor are the dilemmas and improvisations taking place at the pitstops. You’re fully occupied in working out just what’s going on.

It’s absorbing but at two hours plus, the narrative has its longueurs and there are times when you yearn for a little more drama by way of a distraction from the wrangles poisoning the Ferrari marriage.

And in the end, Ferrari himself is not as fascinating as Mann thinks he is. Despite his bouts of guilt and moments of tenderness, there’s a coldness in him which stops you investing your empathy in his sufferings. And Laura, who does deserve your sympathy, is so relentlessly arrogant in her dealings with the world at large that it’s hard to care.

Even so, the film has an integrity which can’t be ignored. It’s a grown-up movie about big ambitions and the disasters which strike when they’re placed above all else. After a fallow eight years, it’s great to see Mann return to the screen.

Ferrari is released in cinemas on January 4.

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