131 min | R | December 25, 2023 | Neon
Enzo Ferrari builds the fastest cars in the world and buries the men who drive them. Michael Mann catches him in 1957 with his company failing, his marriage armed, and his drivers dying on open roads. The machines are gorgeous and the bodies pile up, and Enzo keeps both columns in the same ledger.
Enzo Ferrari builds racing machines and the men who drive them die at the wheel. Michael Mann’s film catches him in the summer of 1957, when the company teeters toward bankruptcy and his marriage detonates over a secret second family. The cars are art and the cars are coffins, and Enzo treats both facts with the same blank calculus. This is not a movie about racing. It is a movie about a man who has decided that the dead are an acceptable cost and who keeps a ledger where his heart should be.
Adam Driver plays Enzo behind tinted glasses and a fixed jaw, a man who refuses to mourn in public because mourning is weakness. He delivers the cruelty quietly. He tells his drivers that a deadly passion is a terrible joy and he means it as comfort. Penelope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari with a loaded pistol and decades of grief, and she detonates every scene she enters. Cruz makes Laura the only person in the film who keeps an honest accounting of what this enterprise costs. Shailene Woodley plays Lina Lardi, the second household, with a softness that exposes Enzo’s split life.
Mann directs from Troy Kennedy Martin’s script with a documentarian’s patience for engineering and a coroner’s eye for consequence. The racing sequences are shot at ground level on real roads, and Mann holds the camera close to the asphalt so the speed registers in the body. The film stays clinical until the Mille Miglia crash, which Mann stages with brutal physical clarity and refuses to soften. The production design renders 1957 Modena in muted grays and oily blacks rather than nostalgic warmth. The score by Daniel Pemberton stays restrained where another film would swell.
The film works best when it treats Enzo as a closed system and worst when it tries to explain him. The domestic scenes carry more charge than the boardroom maneuvering, because Cruz gives Laura stakes that the financial subplot never earns. Mann clearly admires the machinery more than the men, and the film inherits that coldness as both a strength and a limit. The result is a precise, distant study of a man who turned his own losses into horsepower. It observes Enzo with the same detachment he uses on everyone else, and it never pretends to find a warmth that is not there.