by Geoffrey Churchman
A bio-drama about arguably the biggest ever figure in Italian high performance car history seems overdue and this one makes up for the hitherto lack, at least outside Italy.
Rather than a docudrama about his whole, quite eventful life, this concentrates on one episode from it — the lead up to and his then small company’s participation in the 1957 Mille Miglia or thousand mile car race.
Enzo was a long time devoted motor racer, although at 59 he was no longer suited to be a driver, and his Ferrari enterprise was primilarly intended to build cars to compete in international events such as those in Le Mans, Silverstone and Indianapolis. To finance this passion, his business made sports cars, although not in big enough numbers to prevent financial losses. In the 12 months prior to the timeframe of the movie, only 98 production cars had been made.
The big roll of the dice is his plan was to win the 1957 Mille Miglia — that would create lots of orders, along with the prestige he craved. This event was rather like a motorsport version of Le Tour de France with a route over scenic but rough country roads — and at very high speeds. The fact that there was no crowd protection was to prove deadly in this race when one of the five cars Ferrari had entered — a 4.0-litre Ferrari 335 S — hit a curbstone at 250 km/h, bursting a tyre and causing it to somersault, killing driver Alfonso de Portago, his co-driver and nine spectators, five of whom were children.
That’s not the first death that gets portrayed — near the beginning another driver on a practice run also crashes and is killed. It shows the reality that is a high thrills, high profile and glamorous sport, but also a highly dangerous one. In fact between 1955 and 1971 eight drivers were killed at the wheels of Ferrari racing cars.
Another of Ferrari’s drivers, the veteran Piero Taruffi, completed the round trip of the 1957 Mille Miglia to Brescia and won the race.
The movie isn’t just about the car-racing, electrifying as it is, and the complex family life of Enzo Farrari, played by Adam Driver (an apt name) is given ample atttention. He had a son Dino with his legal wife Laura, played by Penelope Cruz, who died at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy in 1956.
Enzo had a second son, Piero, with mistress Lina Lardi — played by Shailene Woodley — in 1945. As divorce was illegal in Italy until 1975, Piero could only be recognized as Enzo’s son after Laura’s death in 1978. At that point he acquired the Ferrari surname and is now vice-president of the company. Piero Lardi’s existence is revealed to Laura in the movie. The movie depicts the tense relationship between Enzo and Laura quite well. She is a party to some of the financial negotiations that Enzo needs to undertake.
The balance between the various components seems about right. Recreation of period atmosphere is always one of my main interests and there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. There is a brief amount of technology for car enthusiasts, but inter-relationships between the characters is important and works fairly well even if most of the drama is provided by Penelope Cruz. Fortunately, flashbacks are quite limited, and dialog manages to fill in most of the necessary historic narrative.
Enzo is reasonably well played, although without much charisma, however, the determination to achieve what he wants comes through.
At the time, Ferrari’s main competition was from Maserati and we get to see some of their cars from the period as well as Ferrari’s. The automotive aspect was my primary interest and it scores an 8 out of 10 on that. Another movie which deals with Ferrari in competion is Ford v. Ferrari from 2019 which was set in 1966 (my review of that).
Ferrari (130 minutes) is screening at the Shoreline.