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This review was originally published on August 31 out of the Venice Film Festival.
We are recirculating it now timed toFerraris theatrical debut.
Be sure to also check out ourIn Conversation with director Michael Mann.
Michael Manns rip-roaringFerraribegins in unlikely silence.
He softly pulls a blanket over their sleeping young son, Piero.
Then, he gently pushes his car out of the driveway so as not to make a sound.
Ferraritakes place over a few pivotal months in 1957, a key year in the automakers life and career.
Ferrari cars have stumbled on the race track.
His local rival, Maserati, has just brought in the French driver Jean Behra to set new records.
Perhaps more importantly, Enzo and Laura have just lost their son, Dino.
Enzo simply asks if the confirmation can be delayed.
Say hes lost his faith in god, he tells Lina.
When it comes to his private life, the man is all evasion and avoidance.
The nature of metal, the priest mulls.
Its all the same thing.
Cars and racing are the religion here.
The movie is not subtle about this.
Every day, he and Laura visit the grave of their son separately.
Mann shows us both the power and the horror of this idea.
Mann doesnt shy away from showing the consequences of this kind of hard-nosed determination.
One climactic moment is so shocking and gruesome you might never want to enter a car again.
As Enzo, Adam Driver somehow manages the impossible.
Hes got convincing jowls and worry lines, and he absolutely goes to town on the Italian accent.
Drivers Ferrari is the opposite: technically imperfect, perhaps, but wonderfullyalive.
You cant take your eyes off him.
This is that Ferrari captured mid-transformation.
The people around him call himcommendatore a not-uncommon title of honor in Italy at the time.
Opera is perhaps the key to Manns film.
An opera company even comes to town.
(Ferrari complains that theyre out of tune.
More in tune than your cars in Monaco last summer, they retort.)
Enzo thinks back on playing with his son Dino.
Lina remembers telling Enzo shes pregnant.
Ferraris mom imagines the day her other son went off to war to die.
Laura recalls a warm family moment back when her family was intact.
Everybodys lost in their own past.
The only way out is forward.
It has something of the unsettling serenity ofManhunter(1986) and the character detail ofHeat(1995).
Part of the score fromThe Insider(1999) even makes a memorable appearance.
Mann has always balanced the intimate with the epic.
InFerrari, he might have found the purest expression of this idea.
To paraphrase a famous line fromHeat, its a movie about metals.
In life, as it is in racing.
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