Michael Mann spent more than two decades trying to bring the story of Enzo Ferrari to the screen, and the film he finally made is not the one most audiences expected. Rather than a sweeping biographical epic or a racing film with a legend at its center, Ferrari focuses on a single summer in 1957, when Enzo Ferrari’s company was on the verge of bankruptcy, his marriage was disintegrating, his secret second family was straining for acknowledgment, and the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile open-road race across Italy, represented either salvation or annihilation.
Adam Driver plays Enzo as a man whose grief and ambition have calcified into a permanent state of controlled intensity. A year after the death of his son Dino, Ferrari moves between his wife Laura’s home and his mistress Lina’s apartment with the mechanical precision of a man who has organized his emotional life into compartments and can’t afford to let them bleed into each other. Driver’s performance has divided audiences sharply. Some find his reserved, interior approach perfectly suited to a man who has armored himself against feeling. Others find it a barrier that prevents engagement with the character at the center of the story.
Mann shoots 1957 Italy with his characteristic attention to texture and light. The film’s visual palette is muted, overcast, the colors of a country still rebuilding. Modena feels lived-in and specific in ways that distinguish it from the usual period-film glamour. This is Italy as a working place, not a postcard, and Mann’s camera finds beauty in garages, factory floors, and rain-slicked cobblestones with the same reverence other directors reserve for coastlines and cathedrals.
Cruz’s Fury and the Domestic Engine
The film’s most dynamic performance belongs to Penelope Cruz as Laura Ferrari, a woman whose rage and intelligence make her the most compelling figure on screen whenever she appears. Laura knows about Lina. She knows about the second child. She has invested her family’s money in the company and watched her husband run it toward ruin while dividing his loyalty. Cruz plays her with a ferocity that cuts through the film’s sometimes measured pacing, bringing an urgency to every scene she occupies.
The confrontation scenes between Driver and Cruz generate the film’s most electric moments. Laura is not a scorned wife waiting for her husband to come home. She is a business partner, a grieving mother, and a woman whose fury is proportional to everything she’s sacrificed. Cruz finds notes of vulnerability beneath the anger without ever softening Laura into a more palatable character. She is difficult, volatile, and completely justified, and Cruz makes sure the audience feels all three.
Shailene Woodley brings a quieter presence as Lina Lardi, the woman who has waited years for Enzo to acknowledge their son publicly. Her scenes provide a counterpoint to the Cruz fireworks, showing a different kind of patience and a different kind of demand. The domestic triangle gives the film its emotional architecture, even when the screenplay doesn’t always develop it with the depth it deserves.
Mann’s staging of the racing sequences represents some of the best work of his career. The Mille Miglia sequence in the film’s final act is a masterclass in building tension through geography, speed, and the physical vulnerability of human bodies in machines traveling at lethal velocities. Mann shoots the race with an emphasis on the mechanical reality of it: the vibration of steering wheels, the spray of gravel, the terrifying proximity of spectators standing at road’s edge. When catastrophe arrives, it arrives with a brutality that is all the more shocking for how precisely it’s been set up.
A Biopic That Can’t Decide Its Own Speed
Ferrari’s central tension isn’t between Enzo and Laura, or between the company’s survival and its risks. It’s between the kind of film Mann wants to make and the kind of film the material requires. The domestic drama is intimate and character-driven, demanding patience and close attention to emotional nuance. The racing sequences are kinetic and visceral, operating at a completely different tempo and energy level. The film oscillates between these modes without ever fully integrating them, creating an experience that feels like two strong films shuffled together.
The pacing in the first two acts has drawn consistent criticism. Mann takes his time establishing the geography of Enzo’s divided life, the financial pressures on the company, and the political dynamics of Italian motorsport in the 1950s. This patience pays dividends for viewers who stay with it, but the film loses some audiences during stretches where domestic scenes feel stalled and the promise of the race feels like it’s being withheld rather than built toward.
Adam Driver’s performance remains the film’s most debated element. His Enzo is a man who experiences emotion at a deep remove, processing everything through a filter of control that rarely cracks. This is a defensible character choice for a man whose life requires compartmentalization, but it creates a lead character who is sometimes difficult to access. The film asks you to read the character through what he doesn’t show, and not every viewer finds that rewarding enough to sustain 130 minutes.
The film’s treatment of the Mille Miglia disaster is harrowing and has generated discussion about how much graphic violence is appropriate in depicting a real event where spectators and a driver died. Mann doesn’t look away from the consequences, and some viewers have found this choice exploitative rather than honest. Others see it as essential to the film’s argument that Ferrari’s obsession with racing excellence had a human cost he was willing to pay with other people’s lives.
The Cost of the Machine
Ferrari’s sharpest insight is about the price of obsession, not in the abstract, motivational-poster sense, but in the specific, bodily sense. Enzo Ferrari loved building fast cars and winning races, and people died because of it. His son died young. His marriage became a battlefield. His mistress waited in a shadow he refused to step out of. Mann doesn’t moralize about any of this. He simply presents the ledger and lets the audience decide whether the balance works out.
The film connects Enzo’s personal compartmentalization to a broader Italian postwar sensibility: a country rebuilding itself by refusing to look too closely at what it lost, channeling grief into velocity and progress. This thematic layer gives the film a richness that rewards repeat viewing, even if the first watch can feel uneven.
Should You Watch Ferrari?
If you’re a Michael Mann completist, Ferrari is essential viewing, flaws and all. The racing sequences alone justify the ticket price, and Cruz’s performance is among the best of her career. Viewers who want a conventional racing film or a biographical epic with a clear emotional arc will find Ferrari frustratingly interior and unevenly paced. The film asks for patience and offers rewards that are more intellectual than visceral, despite having some of the most visceral racing footage ever committed to film. That contradiction is either the film’s signature tension or its fatal flaw, depending on what you came for.
The Verdict on Ferrari
Michael Mann’s decades-long passion project arrives as a film of undeniable craft and uneven impact. Penelope Cruz steals the film from its lead, the racing sequences are extraordinary, and Mann’s recreation of 1957 Italy is lived-in and persuasive. But Adam Driver’s deliberately remote performance and the film’s structural tension between domestic intimacy and mechanical violence prevent it from becoming the great film its best sequences suggest it could be. Ferrari is the work of a master filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants to say but hasn’t quite found the rhythm to say all of it at once.