This is Napoleon for the racing-car world. Adam Driver gives a joyless impersonation of Enzo Ferrari that is the lugubrious equal of Joaquin Phoenix’s leaden Corsican. Penelope Cruz provides the only glimmer of life, as did Vanessa Kirby, playing the feisty but disgruntled and left-behind wife. The car-racing scenes recall the violence and senseless deaths of the European battlefields. Spectacle is big, but both films left me bored and cold.
“Based on a true story” often leads to dramatic problems. I suppose the events depicted are more-or-less what happened, but a satisfying story they do not make. There is no hero who rises to the occasion: in fact, the one charmer we are tempted to like ends up disembodied. All signs point to the climactic final race, the Mille Miglia, but other than showing a surprise winner we have barely met it is presented as anticlimax. The company, we are to believe, is to be saved not by daring or skill, or even luck, but by [spoiler alert] bribing journalists. This is the audience payoff?! Maybe, like the referenced Italian opera, this aspires to tragedy, but at least in opera there is good music.
My biggest problem was the usually reliable Adam Driver. Perhaps Michael Mann cast Driver after seeing him in House of Gucci, but here he is an empty big suit who smiles but once (at his son) and isn’t convincing as lover, corporate titan, former race car driver or even Italian. You wind up wondering, what’s he doing in this pseudo-Italian movie? Speaking of which, what’s with the actors speaking English with Italian accents? Instead of being realistic, it sounds like they’re from Jersey. And it makes them hard to understand. As for Shailene Woodley, as wholesome as apple pie, I couldn’t tell if she was speaking English because she was supposed to be an American.
As a sports nut, I usually can follow what’s happening on the playing field, but I was at a loss to understand the Mille Miglia, which I consider the film’s fault, not mine. Was this a race against time, but then what were the scenes of cars jockeying for position? If it was a race among cars, what were the clunkers with numbers that were zoomed past by the Ferraris and Maseratis? And how were we to tell which of those were which? Enzo makes a point of instructing his driver to “show this card” at the checkpoint, as if this will be a critical factor, but unlike Chekov’s gun we never see it again. And, really, he tells his drivers how he wants them to race just as they are about to pull out of the gate?
Regarding my personal obsession with cigarettes in movies, my wife argues that they are true to the period depicted, yet to my surprise in this film taking place in 1957 Italy, when you’d think Enzo and his buddies would be smoking like Bernstein, they manage to portray their characters without a puff. There is still the obligatory and totally gratuitous cigarette when one of the Ferrari drivers implausibly prepares to light up in his vehicle until chastened by Enzo. My attention to this detail shows how engrossed I was in the story.
