Michael Mann’s strange and frequently beguiling Ferrari, which covers three eventful months in the life of Italian motor racing driver and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), is a long-time passion project for its ever-idiosyncratic auteur. Mann wanted to make the film as far back as the early 2000s, when screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin’s adaptation of a 1991 Ferrari biography by journalist Brock Yates was brought to his attention. It took a few false starts and several major cast changes, in addition to what a massive number of executive producer credits suggest is a transglobal patchwork of financiers. The result bears the scars of a long and rocky gestation, though not always to its detriment.
Reviewing Mann’s 1986 serial-killer thriller Manhunter, Chicago Reader critic Pat Brown described it as “simultaneously hypnotic and enervating, meditative and empty, like a white-noise background or a field of electronic snow.” That sense of concurrent being and non-being is key to the Mann aesthetic and ethos. Across his films, his characters assert themselves even as they remain oddly opaque, and the worlds that he conjures, though grounded in heavily factual research, often feel fantastical and tenuous, decidedly not of this earth.
Ferrari was shot primarily in Modena, Italy, where its lead character mainly resided, though verisimilitude is in no way on the menu. The film takes place in “1957” (the numbers appear on screen in an especially aggressive size and font) much as Mann’s gangster epic Public Enemies transpired in “1933.” We’re in a dynamic idea of the past that Mann approaches with strapping currency, which mirrors Ferrari’s single-minded stride through every waking second of his day.