Ferrari film review: not into cars? Don’t let that put you off
The real story is a human one: a man, Enzo Ferrari, with an engineer’s mind and a philanderer’s heart and the two not-to-be-crossed women in his life.
Ferrari (MA15+)
131 minutes
In cinemas
★★★½
Melodrama is a word that tends to be used in a pejorative sense, as in “Don’t be so melodramatic”. Yet some people live melodramatically so for them the word means life as it is.
Such is the case for Italian racing car driver turned automotive entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari (a convincing Adam Driver) and his take-no-prisoners wife Laura (a spectacular Penelope Cruz) in Michael Mann’s Ferrari, which is part drama, part melodrama, all real, or close to real.
If you are not into motor sports, don’t let that put you off. There is some racing – which is so well-filmed that you will feel behind the wheel – but the real story is a human one about a man with an engineer’s mind and a philanderer’s heart and the two not-to-be-crossed women in his life: his wife Laura and his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley).
It’s not a biopic (Ferrari lived from 1898-1988) but a pit stop. It unfolds over four months in the Italian summer of 1957, when Ferrari is 59 and his business and marriage are crashing and burning. In the first few minutes Laura fires a pistol at her husband’s head. The bullet misses. Ferrari then visits the tomb of his son, Alfredo, who died of muscular dystrophy at age 24. “You mother missed on purpose,’’ he tells his son. “One day she won’t and I’ll be in here with you.”
This sets the scene for the drama that follows. Laura knows that the real trigger in any conflict with her husband is money. The scene where she negotiates a contract with him is brilliant, as is one where they argue over their late son. Their grief permeates everything they do.
I wrote “all real, or close to real” because when just two people are in a room they are the only witnesses to what happens.
Lina has a different bargaining chip. She and Ferrari have a 12-year-old son, Piero. She wants the boy to take Ferarri’s name but that’s a complicated decision for the man behind the prancing black stallion badge. He has lost his first son and heir and has yet to publicly recognise his second son.
This film spent a long time in the repair pit. The Scottish screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote the gripping 1985 television miniseries Edge of Darkness, is credited with the script though he died in 2009.
The director worked on the script but says the heart of it was already there. The main source material is Brock Yates’s 1991 book Enzo Ferarri: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine, though the director also used Ferrari’s 1963 memoir, My Terrible Joys, to peer inside the man’s mind. Mann’s films include The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999) and Collateral (2004). He’s known for action scenes and the climactic moment in Ferrari is a car race that more than fits this bill. Filmed by Erik Messerschmidt (Oscar winner for David Fincher’s 2020 film Mank) it is spectacular to watch in a have-to-see/want-to-look-away-from kind of way.
Driver, an American, is believable as Ferrari, who, emotionally speaking, is part machine, part man, an intriguing mix in the current age of artificial intelligence.
There’s a wonderful scene where he describes the working of a car engine to Piero, who he loves, as he does his first son. He tells him that it only takes one part of the mechanism to go awry for the whole engine to fail. He could be talking about himself.
Yet overall this is Penelope Cruz’s film. It’s one of the greatest performances in her stellar career. Like Carey Mulligan in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, also in cinemas now, she goes head-to-head with the title character and the result is pedal to the metal powerful and impressive.
Dream Scenario (MA15+)
101 minutes
In cinemas
★★★½
Nicolas Cage’s new film, Dream Scenario, is a tour-de-force performance by the actor who won an Oscar almost three decades ago for Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas (1995).
Cage turns 60 on January 7. His well-documented real estate and taxation problems saw him take just about any role on offer from the late 1990s onward, which may explain the unfortunate 2006 remake of The Wicker Man.
He reportedly paid off his debts by 2022, leaving him free to be more selective. Interestingly he hasn’t chosen that path. Dream Scenario is the final of six films he made in 2023.
With so much under his belt, it’s perhaps far-fetched to suggest he is taking on an utterly “new” character, yet in this black comedy-drama, the English language debut of Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, he comes close.
Paul Matthews (Cage) is a tenured professor of biology at a university in Massachusetts. He’s bespectacled, bearded, largely bald, married for 15 years to Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and has two daughters.
In April, Cage was the campily handsome Count Dracula in the comedy-horror Renfield. Seven months later he is a “remarkable nobody” who specialises in the role of ants in evolutionary biology.
Then the dreams start and the prof’s life changes. People in his social orbit, including his daughters, start having dreams in which he appears and does nothing. He just “occupies the space, like an awkward guest at a party”.
The dream sequences are well-filmed (cinematographer Benjamin Loeb). In one, a male student is in the woods, wearing a tuxedo, and being chased by a giant red human-like figure. His professor turns up and does nothing.
Such dreams weight the chip on the professor’s shoulder. He can’t find a publisher for his book on ants (his wife reminds him that he’s yet to write it) and his research is, in his opinion, ripped off by rival academics.
Then the dreams change. The professor does do something and it isn’t good. They spread throughout the world, transforming into a “dream epidemic”. The professor goes viral.
“I’m finally cool?’’ he asks one of his daughters when she asks him to drive her to school.
Here the director explores the vapidity of online fame.
Initially the professor is so hot that the lemonade manufacturer Sprite, and former US president Barack Obama, are keen to team up with him.
But as the dreams become nightmares, he is no longer not just hot, but cancelled from everywhere, including his own home. Except, in a nice comic touch, he is welcome in France and on a television show hosted by Tucker Carlson.
“It’s the dreams. I have nothing to do with it,’’ he tells his family. But the social media world has ruled, quickly, definitely and ill-informedly, as it tends to do. This goes to another of the biologist’s areas of interest: zebras. They have stripes, he tells his students, not to stand out but to blend in with the herd.
And the herd rules.
The scene where the professor sits down to video a personal apology – to the click-driven world – is Oscar-worthy.
At the same time, he resists. When told the dreams have led to his students suffering from trauma, he almost yells, “Trauma is a trend these days. Getting bad grades is trauma. It’s a joke. They need to grow up.”
Cage is in fine form throughout. He leaves us wondering if the nightmares are just that, the bad dreams of others, influenced by the global online coverage, or whether they are in fact his own dreams and, if so, whether he is making them come true.
As I watched I was strongly reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, which was filmed in 2000 by Mary Harron. Is what we see Patrick Bateman/Professor Matthews doing actually happening or is it a figment of their imaginations?
This film is a thoughtful, funny and timely satirical dissection of the cancel culture age in which we live, lifted throughout by Cage’s performance. That he can act is something not even the US Internal Revenue Service can argue with.
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