Ferrari
The biopic of the Italian sportscar manufacturing mogul depicts a man struggling to keep the different aspects of his life in a suitable order.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warning: Death; Child loss; Bereavement.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Ferrari is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Michael Mann’s Ferrari is set in 1957 and stars a greyed-up Adam Driver as the then middle-aged Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Italian sports car manufacturer that bears his name. He continues to run the business with his estranged wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), their marriage destroyed by their grief at the recent death of their adult son Dino from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and by Enzo’s infidelities. He leads a double life, spending much of his time with his long-term mistress Linda Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese).
With the company losing money fast, Enzo is urged to bring in outside investment and increase production. To this end, he desperately needs a stellar performance from his team of drivers in the prestigious cross-country Mille Miglia race. They include the veteran Piero Tuffi (Patrick Dempsey), Englishman Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), and Spanish new recruit Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), who attracts as much media attention for his romance with actress Linda Christian (Sarah Gadon) as for his driving. Enzo also needs Laura to give him control over her stake in the business, but their relationship is tested further as she discovers more about his affair with Linda.
More than a manufacturer
One of the central themes of Ferrari, I think, is the weighing down of people, events, and entities with more significances than they can comfortably bear. Ferrari, as an institution, is emblematic of this. A former racing driver himself, Enzo is concerned above all with producing cars that can win races. Yet the hard reality he faces is that the company’s business model – even as a high-end manufacturer – is dependent on making more cars and finding enough buyers for them, and this requires some external funding, challenging Enzo’s control over the enterprise. The relationship between sporting and commercial success can be synergistic, as winning races sells cars, but this inevitably changes the meaning of what racing is for.
Ferrari is also a significant employer within Modena, and its synonymity with the city raises Enzo to the status of celebrity there. Italy’s passion for motor racing turns car manufacturers from brands into objects of fan loyalty and of patriotic pride. This is illustrated by Gianni Agnelli (Tommaso Basili), head of Fiat, seeking to dissuade Enzo over the phone from doing business with Ford, as an American company, over him. The encounter locates the film’s subject matter within the political economy of post-war Italy: reliant on American investment in the wake of the Second World War and in the context of the Cold War, but also with strongly national industrial cultures such as car-making that shaped work, welfare, and consumption.1
Finally, the company – whose shares are jointly all held by Enzo and Laura – also signifies their marriage. They are together as both spouses and business partners. Enzo cannot easily extricate himself from either arrangement and yet circumstances compel him to do both. As a result, their relationship becomes increasingly nakedly contractional, and even their continued gestures of care for each other have a visible economic value. The tragedy of their son Dino’s death not only dooms their marriage, but also jeopardises the wellbeing of Ferrari by denying Enzo the heir that will keep the business in the family.
A deadly business
Ferrari also centres on another unbearable paradox: the lethality of motor racing. ‘It’s our deadly passion,’ Enzo tells his team of drivers. ‘Our terrible joy.’ It is not only simultaneously a sport and a business; the addition of a third element, leading-edge technology, raises the stakes further. ‘You have perhaps a crisis of identity: am I a sportsman…or a competitor?’, Enzo explains. This is a tension at the heart of all sports, between aesthetics and ethics on the one hand and results on the other. Yet the choice Enzo places in front of his drivers carries added weight, for it means making split-second decisions that could cost them and their opponents their lives.
Motor racing thus brings death incongruously into spaces of work, spaces of pleasure. Those spaces simultaneously render death shocking and senseless, amid the mundanity of everyday routines. Meaning is applied again in part through money: the compensation of the bereaved, a vacancy for jobseeker. It is also applied in part through controlling the narrative of events, something Enzo wrestles with the Italian press – sometimes cajoling, sometimes bargaining – in order to do.
Failing to compartmentalise
As an engineer, and as a man, Enzo Ferrari is driven to pursue control things in this way, to apply order. ‘I have to have all the cards in my hand,’ he explains to Laura. The engine design he pores over at one point with Piero, lovingly explaining how it works, functions as a metaphor for his broader worldview. He is constantly seeking to properly compartmentalise the different aspects of his world. To keep the sporting and commercial aspects of Ferrari separate, so that the latter does not override the former. To convince each of his drivers that they will be the one to win the Mille Miglia. To separate the tragedy of accidents from the glory of victories.
‘Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same moment in time’, he tells his drivers, speaking of the zero-sum game of intimidating a rival driver into letting you pass, rather than risk crashing. Yet the true metaphor for life is not Enzo’s motor, but the collision. Sport, money, love, sex, death, all vying to imbue the same spaces, the same events, with different meanings. These are rival forces battering into each other beyond the control of any one individual, who can but try to convince the world and themselves otherwise, until the delusion becomes manifest. Enzo’s greatest and grandest folly of all is his infidelity, his double life, his parallel paternities, whose coexistence prove beyond his powers to maintain.
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On the Cold War and the political economies of Western Europe, see:
Charles Maier, ‘The World Economy and the Cold War in the Middle of the Twentieth Century’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 44–66.
William I. Hitchcock, ‘The Marshall Plan and the Creation of the West’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume I: Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 154–174