Ferrari 2023
I wasn't sure I wanted to see another historic racing movie not that long after Ford v. Ferrari, but it has gotten pretty good reviews, especially for the acting leads, Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz. It is set mostly in 1957 with the Ferrari car company in a financial crisis and Enzo Ferrari's private life in a crisis, but the Ferrari cars still dominating the racing world. A lot of the cars are still open cockpit, sometimes single seaters, and don't even have seatbelts. A number of Ferrari drivers died. All of that makes for an interesting setting, but the story isn't quite as exicting as you might hope. While there is a lot of racing, including the 1957 Mille Miglia ("1,000 miles") road race through Italy, a lot of the dramatic focus is on Ferrari, his wife, and his mistress. His wife owns half of the company and handles a lot of the business while Enzo focuses on racing. Penelope Cruz does some great acting, no question. Adam Driver plays the eternally cool Enzo Ferrari well as a mostly quiet man with incredible drive and determination. They don't go into a lot of details of how Ferrari created such great cars: the cars just show up one after another as if by magic. I have a feeling that Ferrari was one of those quiet, but intensely compentent people that are just hard to know and even harder to make a movie about. You end up with an interesting portrait of Enzo Ferrari with some very good racing footage thrown in. As far as I can tell, the movie sticks mostly to the facts, though you would have to read the 1991 book that the movie is based on to know for sure. I wish there was a stronger narrative at work, but true life sometimes doesn't provide a narrative that works in a two-hour movie.
Written: 26 Dec 2023