I was toying with what to see on Sunday, looking at either The Boys in the Boat or Ferrari. Both looked like Oscar bait, one from director George Clooney and the other from Michael Mann. Neither were really grabbing me. Heck, I haven’t even seen a trailer for The Boys in the Boat. I ended up selecting Ferrari because it was playing a little later and was thinking I could catch the other the following morning before I had to get to my mid-afternoon New Year’s dinner. I only put one post out a day at most here. That could work.
Then I ended up not going to see The Boys in the Boat anyway. I can probably catch it next weekend.
Enzi Ferrari (Adam Driver) is a former Italian race car driver who later started his own car company. His vehicles are not mass-produced and built mostly for racing which does bring in wealthy customers for the cars he sells. However, his company is hitting hard times in the summer of 1957. In order to attract outside money to keep his company afloat, he’ll need to have one of his cars, driven by a racer in his employment, win the big Mille Miglia, a treacherous Italian road race that runs the length of the country. That should bring in outside money from either Fiat or Ford. If he can get that money, he can keep his company running, invest it, perhaps produce more cars to sell, and so on.
However, that isn’t his only problem: Enzo and his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) are still married, work as business partners (she has a large number of shares in the company), but also in deep mourning since the death of their only son. Laura doesn’t mind that Enzo sleeps around, but she is unaware that he has a second, illegitimate son by his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), and Lina would like Enzo to give the boy the Ferrari name. Enzo is reluctant because Laura’s feelings over the death of their son are still raw. Between this situation and the threat to the company’s future, Enzo had better hope he can at least win that race and keep his business afloat. Can Enzo find a way through his problems?
To be honest, I’m not sure how Adam Driver got this role unless someone thought an actor named “Driver” should play a former racer. I like Driver in a lot of roles, but this one feels a bit flat. His hair is dyed white for most of the movie, and it seems to me an older actor would have probably worked better. But here, he seems so emotionally flat. He should perhaps have a great passion for racing or something, but it never really comes across to me. I might have liked his work better if I was more familiar with the real Enzo Ferrari, but it may not matter: at no point during this movie did I believe Driver’s Enzo was all that invested in the road race, but to be fair, I wasn’t that invested in him.
That said, I was impressed by Cruz as Laura Ferrari, and I found myself wishing she was getting more screentime as her situation came across much better to me than Enzo’s. Laura has the passion that Enzo seems to lack. The movie has characters talk about Enzo as if he was an asshole or something, with even Enzo’s own mother saying the wrong son survived the war. I wasn’t sure why. Laura has a reason to be mad at Enzo, but the relationship between the two is complicated. Laura as a character was far more compelling, and I wished the movie was more about their relationship, especially with Cruz giving it her all. Ferrari does a lot of things right, but Enzo is a less realized character, and much of that comes from Cruz’s just giving a much better performance than Driver.
Grade: B-
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