In “Ferrari,” Adam Driver towers like a colossus as Enzo Ferrari. Driver is tall and lean, but he looks even taller here – wider, too – in part because Enzo wears boxy suits with linebacker shoulders so wide they almost touch the edges of the frame. Next to the Pope, Enzo is the most famous man in Italy and makes blood-red racing cars with sexy curves and supercharged engines. The Commendatore, as it is called, is more like a tank. He seems an ideal vehicle for Michael Mann, a filmmaker with his own beautiful obsessions.
The film “Ferrari” is largely set in 1957 and focuses on a particularly disastrous year in Enzo’s tangled life. He builds some of the most desirable cars in the world: Not long into the story, a king waits impatiently in Enzo's office. (This little royal personage is careful to make sure his feet reach the pedals easily this time.) The whole world wants something from Ferrari, which in turn only seems to care about its racing cars, adorable red beasts that roar out from its factory nearby his home in Modena and in the world's fastest and deadliest races, where records, machines and bodies are regularly broken.
What makes these cars and Ferraris run permeates the film, which begins with young Enzo (driver) behind the wheel, racing and almost flying. The uptempo, driving jazz on the soundtrack gives the scene a welcoming charm (you'll be ready to jump in Enzo's car, too), as does the smile that spreads across his face. It's one of the few times he cracks one. Soon after, the story revolves around an elderly Commendatore, now gray and imperial, facing bankruptcy as he struggles with both work and two households with two very different women. On a particularly angry morning, you greet him by firing a gun at him, which gets his attention.
Death haunts Enzo and this film gains momentum energetically as Mann busily juggles the story's many parts and conflicting dualisms. Written by Troy Kennedy Martin, the film is based, albeit only strategically, on Brock Yates' lucid 1991 biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Racing, the Machine. (Martin also wrote the original, auto-centric caper film “The Italian Job.”) While the book traces its subject (and its brand) from the cradle to beyond the grave, the film condenses the automaker's life into a brief, symbolic period of a series of dramatic contrasts, including two sons, one living and one dead, as well as the street cars Enzo sells and the racing cars that represent his life's passion.