Ferrari * * *

This car moves quicker than the  film.

I was expecting something different, but it's okay.  Ferrari features on just a few years of Enzo Ferraris life in the late fifties.  At this stage he was building up his factory in Modena, after WWII. 

Most of the critical aspects of his life we learn through conversation with his rather crazy wife Laura, and his grumpy Mama. 

This is the time when he was teetering on bankruptcy, his marriage was all but over and his wife was becoming ever more erratic. Enzo had ideas about the future and so did she and they did not align, but Laura held the purse strings. 

Laura becomes particularly uncooperative when she learns of Enzo's serious affair. She could always turn a blind eye to his casual womanising. But when she discovers that he has fathered another child with another woman, it tips her over the edge. 

 Laura and Enzo once had a son (Dino) who died earlier and since then they have continued to live in mutual blame, grief and domestic conflict.

Fortunately the film remembers that Ferrari is essentially about cars and car racing and on that score it delivers quite well. This was a time where crashes nearly always killed and the mortality rate of drivers was terrible. In this film they are re-enacted quite convincingly and quite terrifyingly.  

The obsessiveness of Enzo Ferrari, coupled with a philosophical acceptance of the slaughter of drivers, (rather like a war general) is disturbing but weirdly impressive.

Adam Driver (such a happily coincidental name) does well as Enzo Ferrari whilst Penelope Cruze does her beautiful crazy lady thing again as Laura Ferrari.  

It's a pretty good film made by a couple of old professionals.  Michael Mann directed it from a screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin.  Martin has been dead for nearly fifteen years so he must have written it quite some time ago.

(And thanks to Candy for giving me the Lux Ticket for Christmas :))