‘Ferrari’ Boasts an Oscar-Worthy Penélope Cruz and Some Very Sexy Cars

There is an unstoppable force at the center of Michael Mann’s Ferrari. It is fast, fierce, and wildly unpredictable. One moment it has you in the throes of ecstasy; the next, fearing for your life. And when you see it coming around the bend, it’s curtains. Don’t even bother putting up a fight. You’ll lose.

I’m talking, of course, about Penélope Cruz.

Hell hath no fury like her Laura Ferrari, the wife of Italian automaking icon Enzo Ferrari (a stately Adam Driver). When we first meet Laura, clad in a nightgown, eyes that haven’t seen sleep in days, she lashes out at her husband’s “whoring” before firing a bullet just past his head. We soon learn that her wrath is warranted — she’s been traded in for a younger model (Shailene Woodley) with whom Enzo’s fathered a child, making poor Laura the laughingstock of fair Modena. Adding insult to injury, Laura learns of the affair, and the love child, just one year after the tragic passing of her and Enzo’s beloved son, Dino. She is the one we are rooting for here. Enzo and his fleet of Ferraris don’t stand a chance.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other pleasures to be had in Mann’s handsome biopic, which opens in 1957 as Enzo’s sports car company is on the brink of collapse, hemorrhaging cash and churning out a measly 98 vehicles a year. Its only hope lies in besting reigning champs Maserati in the Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile race across Italy known for claiming the lives of many a driver. If they win, Enzo reasons, the Ferrari car orders will come pouring in.

And there is car porn aplenty in Ferrari — sleek, sexy, lipstick-red coupes zipping around hairpin turns like Maverick in his F-18. Their engines roar, their bodies sculpted to perfection. They are monuments to Italian craftsmanship, wedding form and function, that will impress even the Prius crowd. And Mann delights in the glory of these machines, especially when they’re sent flying through the air. There is a car accident in this film so extraordinarily visceral and violent that it left the entire theater in stunned silence. You’ll still leave wanting to take one of these beauties out for a spin, though.

Mann may be 80 years old, but he’s still possessed of that attention to detail that made us fall in love with his pictures in the first place. Every shot of the filmmaker’s two-hour-plus drama looks pristine; every costume and set dead-on balls accurate. One scene, in particular, stood out to me in this regard: as Enzo and his team of five Mille Miglia drivers mug for the paparazzi against their shiny cars, the boss pulls one of their movie-star girlfriends (Sarah Gadon) toward him so she doesn’t block the Ferrari logo.

Enzo’s men call him Commendatore, which is sure to give Sopranos fans a bit of a tickle, and Driver earns the title, his silver-haired tycoon lumbering through Ferrari with the quiet resolve of a general leading his troops into battle. He doesn’t look lost like he did in House of Gucci, though the performance is stuck in a similar gear. Nobody throws a temper tantrum quite like Driver, but there are none to be had here. Nearly all of the film’s emotion heft is carried by Cruz, whose Laura is pitched somewhere between Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Blow on the chaos meter. You don’t really buy Enzo’s devotion to his mistress — or Woodley’s Italian accent, for that matter — or to their young son, but you get why he can’t leave Laura, and why the two can go from being at each other’s throats to banging away on the kitchen table in the blink of an eye. This is Cruz’s richest American film role in god knows how long, and she eats it up. An Oscar nod is all but guaranteed.

But there’s something missing from Ferrari. Like much of Mann’s oeuvre, it operates at an emotional remove, keeping the viewer at arm’s length. This works fine when we’re navigating the criminal underworlds of Heat and Collateral, but less so when it comes to marital discord, or sport. Unlike 2019’s Ford v. Ferrari — a film Mann was attached to direct at one point, and feels like a companion piece of sorts to this one — he fails to flesh out any of the drivers, so when they spin out (and worse) during the big race, the impact is blunted. It’s a shame, since the Mille Miglia sequence is so spectacularly shot and designed. With sports car after sports car revving across fields, around mountains, and down city streets lined with onlookers, you’ll wonder how they pulled it off.  

During the film’s Venice press conference, Mann explained that he was drawn to the character of Enzo Ferrari because he was “a man of contradictions.” Ferrari struggles to unravel them, but makes a valiant effort.

And frankly, Cruz’s turn alone is worth the price of admission.

Ferrari hits theaters nationwide on Dec. 25.

From Rolling Stone US.