Paul Keelan
Despite the sexiness of its sports car appeal and an esteemed auteur behind the lens, Michael Mann’s Ferrari flew mostly under the radar when it was released last winter, tallying lackluster box office receipts ($43.3 million) that didn’t even recoup half the budget ($95 million). Even the discourse was fairly tepid. There was some initial shock and hubbub (including Bilge Ebiri’s excellent in-depth analysis) over Mann’s gruesome, horrifyingly visceral depiction of a deadly slow-motion car crash. There was much commotion about Adam Driver and Shailene Woodley’s laughably idiosyncratic (or “absolutely awful“) Italian accents. Beyond that, perhaps the only meaty philosophical debate centered around the ethical contours of the film’s titular subject, Enzo Ferrari (played by Driver).
One of the primary sources (in addition to a recent Cinephile Hissy Fit podcast) for the niche dialectic concerning the ethics of Enzo’s portrayal was Noah Berlatsky’s CNN op-ed enigmatically titled “The Accidental Revelation in Ferrari.” Berlatsky starts off the article with a broad jab at the increasingly corporate-oriented preoccupations of the movie industry, noting, “Hollywood loves a heroic capitalist,” before citing Tony Stark’s industrialist billionaire persona, and films like Air, The Founder, and Ford vs. Ferrari as chief examples of Tinseltown’s ubiquitous infatuation with entrepreneurial stories about products and business moguls.
Berlatsky is not wrong here, and if anything, his succinct albeit cursory list of references only skims the surface. From cautionary streaming tales about Silicon Valley (The Dropout, WeCrashed, The Playlist) to feature films about nostalgic paraphernalia and technology (TETRIS, The Beanie Bubble, Flamin’ Hot), our screens have recently been invaded and inundated by treacly tributes and alarmist parables focused on the tech we use, the foods we eat, the apps we rely on, and the games we play.
However, Berlatsky overplays his hand a bit, lumping all these corporate/consumerist-based stories into the same box:
“Whatever the genre, they’re portrayed as brave visionaries with some idiosyncratic flaws (say, sexual infidelity) who overcome staid conventional wisdom to save the world/deliver reliable food at a cheap price/make a branded athletic shoe/push capitalism forward for the good of all.
While many entries in the subgenre follow a buttery formula, vapid unctuousness is not the case in every instance. For every hagiographic, feel-good dad-flick like Air, there’s an inarguably darker, more cynical take on technology’s sinister and shady capitalist origins, i.e., Blackberry. Aligned with the latter, Ferrari is similarly much too ambivalent to fit into such a rigid thesis. Ditching the craven, sycophantic lens of its pro-corporate coevals and openly hostile to pandering to pro-capitalist sentiments, Ferrari doesn’t easily fit into a pro-industrialist template.
As Berlatsky points out, Ferrari is “blunter” than other contemporary cinematic treatments of industry titans. Instead of glossing over the underbelly of progress and production, Mann candidly investigates “the worst-case results of capitalist exploitation.” And yet, despite this acknowledgment, Berlatsky nonetheless seems to come away thinking Mann intended to portray Enzo in a positive light, baiting audiences to root for the automobile icon:
Viewers are supposed to sympathize with Enzo’s predicaments as he negotiates with his wife and mistress, as he plays with his son, as he fights to preserve his company. There is a problem with Enzo as capitalist hero, however. Preserving his company means risking people’s lives.
This would indeed be a hypocritical predicament for Mann, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case. To the contrary, as Berlatsky admits, Ferrari intentionally “leaves you questioning why we’re cheering on this rich guy and his wealth accumulation in the first place.” The ambivalence and moral murkiness of its lead character, Enzo, are too complex and convoluted to reduce to easy appraisals. Yes, as Berlatsky negatively expostulates, “Enzo has built his fortune literally on the blood and bones of his workers.” At the same time, Mann doesn’t flinch, sugarcoat, or shy away from this aspect of Enzo’s legacy and life, nor does he limit his subject to a univocal perspective.
In fact, Mann is on record citing Enzo’s irreconcilable frictions as a central theme of the film:
The revelation for me with Enzo was the spectacular duality of the man. A lot of forces in his life are contrary to other impulses and forces. Now, if you said to him, “How do you explain your contradictory modalities of living a life?” not only would he be bored and not answer you — he wouldn’t even credit what you’re talking about. And that’s the way things operate in life.
These reflexive insights reveal just how radically Mann’s aesthetic and narrative motivations conflict with the general Hollywood zeitgeist. Far from selling us another gullible success story, Ferrari shows us the irresoluble paradoxes of human nature through a polyvalent portrait of an automobile pioneer. As Jay Rohr put it in Film Obsessive’s initial, even-handed review, “Ferrari wants to be a drama about people pulled apart by love and mourning. Yet it also wants to be a business thriller about a scrappy underdog avoiding bankruptcy.” Whether it is effective or not will get varying mileage from person to person. Thais said, one thing is unambiguous: the film asks audiences to wrestle with its spiritual, economic, and ethical predicaments and quandaries without jumping to quick conclusions or decisive judgments.
Untangling Ferrari’s Theological & Mythological Dimensions
For one, Ferrari is as, if not more, interested in the religious undercurrents of modern industry as he is interested in its pecuniary aspects. In an early racing sequence, Mann cuts between a car on the track and Enzo at church. The latter is performatively listening to a sermon while paying closer attention to his stopwatch, as the sound of the starting gun and car looping the track can be overheard. The scene hints at Enzo’s dualistic composition, unveiling a figure who cares deeply about his public persona but ultimately cares more about his trade and ambitions.
The proximity and presence of a pulpit also allow the film to wax philosophic about the theological purpose of the car manufacturer as the priest proclaims that Jesus would be a metalworker, as opposed to a carpenter, if alive in their specific, modern historical setting. Speaking with an oratory flourish, we hear about metal’s cosmological power as something that can be “honed and shaped […] into an engine with power to speed us through the world.”
This metaphorical and metaphysical connection welds into the film’s steely veneer. A man of his time and provincial culture, Enzo’s pursuits undoubtedly contain a spiritual dimension. Despite being a successful luxury car businessman, he cares about much more than just money. Enzo mostly cares about the interplay of physical speed and aesthetic composition: how fine-tuning and designing a thing of stunning symmetry might forge a technological feat of efficiency and speed that achieves something sacred. In his own words, Enzo doesn’t race to sell cars; he sells cars to race.
For Enzo, racing and competition aren’t about winning for the sake of bragging or fame. Racing is Enzo’s testing grounds for developing luxury cars, and I’d argue that Mann depicts his motives accordingly. This is why Enzo acts as a busybody throughout the film: relentlessly pensive, restlessly inquisitive, and always trying to enhance his sports cars. He wants to optimize their performance, streamline their symphonic operations, and improve their flaws; he wants to win, sure, but winning is solely a means to an end; more importantly, Enzo wants to transubstantiate metal into a higher state of structural harmony and perfection.
Coincidentally, Enzo tells his son that beautiful things tend to be better made: “I have a secret to tell you. In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.” With this pedagogical advice, Mann is once again likening Enzo—the metalworker—to Jesus—the carpenter—as dual creators unleashing divine forces and harnessing fire. This elevates Enzo into a godlike pantheon; in mythological terms, Enzo resembles Hephaestus, the Greek/Olympic god celebrated for harnessing fire to form magical metal objects. Enzo’s confession also reveals a glaring disregard for capitalist paradigms. Inverting our expectations of his branded surname, Enzo doesn’t hold the corporate attitude one might assume of an entrepreneur of his caliber. Despite the commercial posterity of his car company, he is depicted as a man on a deeper mission to achieve a vehicular form of excellence and beauty.
Through and through, Enzo seems to be preoccupied with the Platonic Ideal: the consummate vehicle. For Plato, objects were intrinsically beautiful; “aesthetics” derives from the Greek “aesthetics,” meaning “of sense perception” – and thus, our role is to perceive and extract the sensory beauty in things. This contradicts our predominant way of seeing the entrepreneurial artist today. In contemporary times, the product maker is more aligned with Adorno’s cynical analysis of a shift in aesthetic principles, as the concept of beauty became linked to consumption and material desires, diminishing its intrinsic value by reducing it to something commercial, transient, and mercenary.
Michael Mann fits this same Platonic distinction, pursuing aesthetic percipience over profits. Accordingly, Ferrari intermittently feels like a credo and doctrine on his prime tenets as an auteur. Although he shares a screenwriting credit with Troy Kennedy Martin (who passed away in 2009 but initially co-wrote the script in the 2000s), one can’t help but find the screenplay (and Enzo’s dogmatic approach to car-making) to be a self-reflexive commentary on Mann’s canon and career, which boasts commercial appeal yet springs from a deeper, more aesthetic, scientific, and religious well of creativity.
Lyrical and zealously unique, Mann’s films prioritize the (usually masculine) pursuit of sublime beauty. As action-adjacent and genre-friendly as they often are, they never feel aesthetically craven or financially motivated. Mann always appears to be after something transcendent, poetic, and ineffable. He is a “carpenter” and a “metalworker” in his own right, concerned first and foremost with the architectural chrysalis of his cinematic creations.
The Higher Calling of Car Racing & Manufacturing
Likewise, Enzo holds fast to a romantic notion of beauty as something transcendent, functioning more as an artist than a competitive sportsman or proprietor. When he discusses the exquisite harmony and formal potentiality of his automobile designs, one realizes he treats physics and engineering with an aspirational reverence that supersedes mere mortality. For Enzo, cars are his higher calling, and he leads his life as a man summoned to this fate with melancholic, scrupulous severity. This devotional disposition allows him to build an emotional “wall” around himself and cope with the fatalities of the sport, including the deaths of his close friends, Baconin Borzacchini and Giuseppe Campari.
To a casual bystander, Enzo’s wall is borderline sociopathic, exhibiting a callous fixation on progress without a proportionate degree of respect and concern for human life. This isn’t an unfair read. Enzo dangerously and aggressively pushes his drivers to jeopardize their well-being for the sake of victory, a reality underlined by a callous, quasi-fascistic pep talk he gives midway through the movie:
You lack commitment. Look at the Maserati team: Fangio, Behra, Stirling Moss. Hard-nosed pros. Men with a brutal determination to win. Men with a cruel emptiness in their stomachs. Detachment. Loyal to one thing, not the team. Loyal to their lust to win. Make no mistake, all of us are racers or have been. We are all certain, “It will never happen to me.” Then my friend is killed. I give up racing forever on Monday. I’m back racing by Sunday. We all know it’s our deadly passion. Our terrible joy. But if you get into one of my cars, and no one is forcing you to take that seat, you get in to win. Brake later. Steal their line. Make them make the mistake.
With implacable composure, Enzo holds a hard line here on the perils of driving, displaying a lack of remorse and repentance for past and future accidental deaths of his drivers. This is equally evident earlier in Enzo’s stoic, unsympathetically cold reaction to Eugenio Castellotti’s abrupt death during a trial run on a racetrack. The tragedy occurs while Enzo is entreated by De Portago, who desperately wants to join the elite team of Ferrari drivers. Enzo is not initially persuaded, rejecting De Portago outright. However, once Eugenio Castellotti botches a turn and fatally crashes on the track, Enzo imperturbably changes his tune, telling De Portago to “call my office on Monday.”
The casual, perfunctory manner in which Enzo hires De Portago to be Castellotti‘s replacement on-site is galling. The hasty iciness of Enzo’s decision further underscores his militant, fanatically zealous comportment. Whether his prior traumas had hardened and ossified his heart or not, Enzo visibly values his whizzing vessels of combustible pistons and cylindrical metal over the men driving them, taking an extremist, stony-hearted line on casualties as nothing but impediments to his visionary aims of winning—i.e., pushing the art of racing and automobile design to new thresholds and terrains.
The Problematically Callous Conviction of A Certain Type of Archetypal Artist
Enzo’s stalwart stance is certainly dubious—at least on the surface. As Berlatsky points out in his indictment of the film’s capitalist politics, “While Enzo may be passionate, he’s not the one who’s going to die […] and while he may find the races a joy, he also literally makes money from them.” These are not materially untrue statements. But they only tell the cynical half of the story, reducing Enzo to a spineless, venal, avaricious materialist: “He’s telling the drivers to sacrifice themselves for his bank account.”
Berlatsky’s viewpoint here is well-intentioned, deeply empathic, and sincerely altruistic. And he’s not wrong to point out that “dying for the enrichment of your employer may seem like an extreme form of capitalism […] but it’s not that uncommon.” But the reading simultaneously suffers from a slightly blinkered and myopic grasp of the film’s relationship with its central subject. Yes, Enzo unapologetically summons his drivers to “sacrifice their labor, their health, and even their lives” for the sake of his vision, but his endgame and worldview are not solely to “get rich.”
Enzo’s obsessions far transcend monetary ambitions. His psychopathic commitment to pushing Ferrari toward new frontiers touches upon a deeper desire to advance human performance forward over all else. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Mann is sympathetic to Enzo. This makes sense, given Mann shares firsthand knowledge of making artistic sacrifices and obsessing over aesthetic execution with his subject. It is probable that Mann, like most directors who fight for their vision, relates to Enzo’s alienating stubbornness as well. While Enzo’s indurated insensitivity is ethically profane on a humanist level, his ambitions are ostensibly redeemed (or at least rationalized) when seen in the framework of humankind’s unending quest for greatness.
Of course, the average moviegoer, like Berlatsky, will be appalled by Enzo and Hollywood’s feverish proclivity to “keep telling us the people in charge of [the] meatgrinder are likable.” Audiences are expected to be naturally hesitant to condone or forgive such post-human prerogatives in everyday practice. But when viewed abstractly and from the vantage point of historical distance, Enzo’s unrepentant dedication to his craft highlights a dogged steadfastness that pushes beyond quotidian litigation. When contextualized on a broader cosmic plane, Enzo’s uncaring cruelty challenges the viewer to confront the moral predicaments faced by trailblazers who seek to push the stakes, morally and mortally, to unprecedented extents.
What Berlatsky, along with anyone who interprets Ferrari as oleaginous flattery, fails to reconcile is that Mann ostensibly agrees with the opinion that “Enzo could as easily be the villain here as the hero.” For Michael Mann, sympathy does not equal endorsement. While it is true that “Hollywood is geared to make you root for whoever the studio decides the protagonist is,” Mann is not beholden to gutless studio interests, mandates, and demands in the same way as your average hack director. Ferrari is not a run-of-the-mill commercial venture. It is anything but another idolatrous cash grab entry into a growingly suspect subgenre. It is the byproduct of a personal pet project dating back to 2000: the result of a script he’d been trying to make for over two decades.
A popular visionary himself, Mann simply found Enzo’s tortured and antithetical life story to be reflective of greater existential realities. In Enzo, he discovered a very renowned and recognizable embodiment of the incompatible quagmires inherent in human life:
We all carry things that are in opposition to each other. And they don’t get resolved. They get resolved in archetypal dramas that we craft. Because less complexity is the usual artificial dramatic construction of a character: He’s one dynamic; he’s a contradiction — it will resolve at the end of the movie. This is way different. To me, Enzo was a giant representational picture of something profoundly human.
Enzo’s life proves it is possible to be genuinely compassionate and harshly stolid, morally staunch and recurringly compromised, outwardly impassive and inwardly tormented. Tapping into these incongruous binaries, Mann punctuates Ferrari with Enzo’s domestic disputes, his mournful anguish over his first son’s death, and his paternalistic fixation on bequeathing his legacy to a secretly born second son. In doing so, he creates a character study that suggests our professional and personal lives are anything but simple, painting a portraiture of ethical imbroglio.
There are many indications that Enzo’s hard-bitten demeanor is a façade and perhaps an emotional overcorrection from sheltering and fortifying his inner humanity within a shell of unflinching impassiveness. His softness and suffering in private hint at the likelihood that he’s brazenly confident and ruthlessly emotionless as a tactic of guardedness. This possibly explains why he has no issue with being the scapegoat; after all, granted his godlike stature and his burden of witnessing drivers and friends die in the “metal” he “made,” there is something immortal and inscrutable about his sangfroid demeanor. It is as if he is also burdened by an omnipotent grief so fathomless it has no expressivity.
