Ferrari and the politicization of everything, either cave to progressive demands or be cast out

Critics have generally praised the film, save until politics inevitably enters the picture, namely the depiction of the obsessive nature of genius and the role of women in 1957 Italy of all places, not exactly a hot bed of progressivism. 

The name “Ferrari” is legendary around the world, conjuring images of exotic, high performance cars and racing excellence in a near-mythic way denied to every other brand, even my own beloved Porsche.  Behind the actual brand, was a real person, Enzo Ferrari, who founded the company in post World War II Italy after a short career as a racer in his own right two decades earlier.  It should go without saying that the man is neither the myth nor the legend, far from it.  Like most who aspire to greatness, the real Mr. Ferrari was a complex, incredibly driven, obsessive individual that valued his own perception of his greatness above everything else in life, a fact made plain in Michael Mann’s (close to) masterful biopic, Ferrari, released last Christmas.  The film, wisely in my opinion, eschews the traditional biography formula of attempting to capture an entire life on screen and instead, focuses exclusively on a particularly triumphant and tragic year 1957.  The car company he founded with his estranged wife ten years earlier is rapidly heading into bankruptcy, selling less than 100 cars a year, and burning through cash on Ferrari’s one true passion:  Racing.  His racing efforts have seen better days, however, as rival Maserati beat the record lap time at Ferrari’s local track, threatens his efforts on the actual circuit, and one of his top drivers dies in a tragic accident in practice, thrown from the car as it pinwheels through the air.  The future of the company will come down to a 1,000 kilometer race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.  If Ferrari, played by a pensive Adam Driver, wins, he is likely to secure funding for the future because “You win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”  If he loses, he is likely to be consigned to oblivion.  Complicating matters on a personal level, Ferrari’s child with his long term mistress, Piero, is about to be confirmed and she is pressing her lover to make him a legitimate heir – while his own wife, devastated by the loss of their child a few years earlier, suspects he’s taken up with another woman beyond a simple, throwaway affair.

In less skilled hands, the sheer number of competing plotlines and emotional demands, some of which verge on melodrama, may have resulted in a jumbled, incoherent mess of a movie, but Mr. Mann’s manages to hold everything together across a reasonably tight two hour run time, producing something that, if not perfect, is clearly one – if not the best film of the year – and the best biopic since The Imitation Game.  He succeeds primarily by avoiding wallowing in the why and instead focusing on the what, as in what actually happened to bring these characters to this point, allowing Ferrari, his wife Laura, and his mistress Lina Lardi to speak for themselves, rather than using the film as a vehicle to speak for or comment on them.  The result is an unflinching portrayal of a legend that, while he possesses some admirable qualities, is portrayed much less flatteringly as a haunted, cold, obsessive, driven to succeed in racing above and beyond everything else, down to complaining that photographs taken on the track by the press have more pictures of model’s asses than cars.  In a more light hearted segment, he shows off his new driver to the press by pushing his actress girlfriend away from the Ferrari logo.  He is obviously haunted by the death of his son from muscular dystrophy, the knowledge that he truly did love his wife at one point, what he describes as “There was once I time I loved your mother. Beyond reason. But she was a different creature then,” and still respects her role in founding and running the business.  He needs her and he knows it, but his heart belongs to another at this point.  His wife is equally haunted by the failure of their marriage, the man she once loved little more than a ghost around the house, the fear she will be embarrassed in public, and the loss of her son, which we learn she blames on Ferrari himself for not being able to save him, though saving him was not possible for anyone.  The mistress, Lina, clearly loves Ferrari, but is primarily concerned about the fate of her son and whether he will spend his life as the illegitimate heir of an empire.

The actual racing, where Ferrari became a legend, might seem like an afterthought amid all the drama, save that Ferrari himself cares about racing more than anything else.  The car company, in his view, is merely a vehicle to fund his aspirations on the track, and managing the racing team is where he truly comes alive.  The reasons for this obsession are unclear – Laura posits that the joy and warmth in him was lost during World War II and completely disappeared after the death of their son – but irrational obsessions rarely have clear root causes; we might get close to understanding what drives some to greatness, yet never fully grasp it.  The fact remains that Ferrari himself would sacrifice anything to continue racing, up to and including his company and his family.  The rest of his life might be a complete disaster, but on the race track, he is presented as confident and in complete command, knowing precisely what needs to be done and second guessing none of it.  Ferrari, in real life, once put it this way, “I have yet to meet anyone quite so stubborn as myself and animated by this overpowering passion that leaves me no time for thought or anything else. I have, in fact, no interest in life outside racing cars” and “Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation.”  In the film, he describes it as a cruel hunger and passion, overwhelming everything else even as racing, especially in that era, was always in the “shadow of death.”  In his own racing days, shown as a black and white vignette in the opening of the film, he lost two friends in a single day.  In the present of the movie, his driver dies only to be replaced immediately by a new arrival.  These are the stakes – and whether from some death wish of his own or some other wellspring – this is the world where he thrives and will accept no error from anyone, including himself.  After the new driver cedes a turn to Maserati, he immediately pulls him out of the car and berates him for lacking the killer instinct.  Death is ever present, but to succeed, you must believe it is something that will happen to someone else – to the point where one of his drivers insists he needs an ashtray in his car for safety reasons.

Racing and the future of the business come together at the climax of the film, the Mille Miglia, some 600 miles on public roads across Italy with Maserati as the chief rival to victory.  The Maserati team is not seen much in the film, but their desire to unseat Ferrari is palpable, as is their willingness to sacrifice one of their own cars to run a Ferrari off the road, whatever the risk.  Here, Mr. Mann’s style and skill with motion come together for a truly stunning sequence, through mountains, in cities, that builds on everything we’ve seen before on the track, wisely avoiding the slow motion approach so common to today’s blockbusters and instead putting you in the actual car, rumbling and burbling around you.  The engines roar, the crowds cheer, the landscapes call out to you as the camera sweeps across winding roads and deep woods.  Not surprisingly, the race is neck and neck, with Ferrari and Maserati jockeying positions for the lead – until the lead Maserati is driven off the road instead of the Ferrari, opening up a clear path to victory.  Racing is the cruelest mistress of all, however, and there is one more tragedy in store, in one of the most gut wrenching turnarounds I’ve ever seen in a theater, on par with the terrifying moment in Million Dollar Baby, where you can hear the collective intake of breath from everyone in the room.  As a crowd gathers to watch the cars race by, the young hot shot driver hits something in the road previously established only in passing in a prior shot of light, skillful foreshadowing.  This time, the camera zooms in as the driver’s wheel is sliced open, sending the car careening into the air, hitting a telephone and then spinning down into the crowd like a scythe slicing through grass.  The car is destroyed, both drivers and ten innocent people, mostly children, are dead, struck down by a flying car on the side of the road.  Ferrari wins the race and his company is saved, but at a bittersweet cost as the press tries to blame him for the incident.  Meanwhile, his estranged wife has one more move in mind, helping to save the company while asking him to sacrifice naming his son as heir until her death.  He makes the deal because this is what he is, a racer above all else.  He is, however, given one final touch of humanity, emphasizing that for his faults, Ferrari was capable of emotion.  When one of his team members suggests that the tragedy wasn’t all that terrible because they all live in the shadow of death, Ferrari states the obvious:  Those on the street, especially children, do not.

Mr. Mann leaves it to the audience to decide who is wrong or right, whether Ferrari’s obsession was worth it at such cost.  Critics, meanwhile, have generally praised the film, save until politics inevitably enters the picture, namely the depiction of women in 1957 Italy of all places, not exactly a hot bed of progressivism.  Thus, it was no surprise, yet no less bizarre, when Salon.com lamented that Ferrari was “just another biopic that takes women for a ride” and “much like Oppenheimer, the love story element of Ferrari makes women seem like nothing more than obstacles.”  In the view of Kelly McClure, Nights & Weekends Editor, “the love of the two women in Ferrari – Penélope Cruz as Laura Ferrari and Shailene Woodley as Enzo’s mistress Lina Lardi – is framed as a distraction at best and a career-ending obstacle at worst, just like in most other man-centered biopics where we’re prodded to presume that the man whose story is being told was just too much of a genius, too all-caps important to ever have his full needs met by just one woman.”  Note that the reality of actual historical events doesn’t enter into her assessment.  The fact that Ferrari himself, for better or worse, stated emphatically that racing was all he ever cared about and that the events depicted in the film actually happened is irrelevant.  Truth is supposed to be sacrificed on the altar of progressive pieties, but it’s even more than that:  The film, by any reasonable viewing, doesn’t depict Ferrari as a hero, role model, or any person the average person would ever want to be.  Instead, it tells the story of an obsessive visionary willing to sacrifice everything for his passion, whether we agree it was worth it or not is entirely up to us.  Most would not do the same for obvious reasons, but there is also the obvious truth that people who change the world and become household names do not do so without significant personal sacrifice.  There are few, if any, towering geniuses that led normal home lives, had regular relationships, or regular work hours.  Seventy five years earlier, Thomas Edison slept most nights in his office, worked on his honeymoon, remained estranged from his children, and didn’t come home for days on end.  Teddy Roosevelt, who did have a positive relationship with his wife, worked eighteen hours a day and traveled far from home for months on end at great personal risk.  To a large extent, this is what it takes to become a towering figure whether progressives like it or not.

Further, it is a rather slanted view of the film to deny the credit given to Laura for helping start the business, running it when Ferrari himself was absent, and ensuring its success.  She is depicted as tortured after the death of her son and coping with Ferrari’s affairs, but there is a strength, business acumen, and cleverness to her character that is undeniable.  She is not relegated to second class status in the film, negotiating with the bank and performing many jobs that would normally be reserved for men.  She has almost as much screen time as Ferrari and her decisions drive key plot points, but in a typical case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, giving a woman, who prior to this film was largely unknown, credit and depicting her as strong is not enough.  To progressives, it simply amounts to “What better way to portray women as being completely nuts than to roll out descriptive examples of the many ways in which their mere presence was an inconvenience to a man – just by making the foolish mistake of loving him and hoping for a love of equal value to be returned?”  Ms. McClure, you see, needs the film to have a message – of course, an approved message – and demands that Mr. Mann somehow reduce a complicated life into a progressive parable.  The result is the incoherence all too typical of criticism these days, “The movie trips over itself so much in focusing on his mistreatment of women that it fails to deliver on the part where we’re supposed to see what led him to behave that way, racing the line of cars that the son he had with his mistress, Piero Lardi Ferrari, is currently the vice chairman of, gaining the Ferrari name after Enzo’s wife Laura died, and ownership of the company after Enzo died.”  This incoherence can, not surprisingly, only be resolved by making the movie the way progressives want it to be, whether or not that’s what actually happened or what the filmmakers chose to tell.  “The real story is that these women were just as much a part of making Ferrari a thing as the man whose name is on the logo. Were they to be given biopics of their own, I’m sure that would be made clearer. But, as time has shown, that seems unlikely.”

Ultimately, this kind of random, over the top lament would be entertaining if it weren’t so corrosive or pervasive.  Everything must be placed under the progressive microscope and most will be found wanting – including you.  This is the future they seek, not fettered or confined to the truth, and conforming only to their warped view of the world.