The director’s charming biopic about racing driver-turned-entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari sees a mediocre Adam Driver overshadowed by Penélope Cruz as his likable wife.
It’s a movie replete with seductively curvy sports cars in red lipstick driving through the Italian countryside, with a look that supports an explosive and passionate marital discord. And this undeniably beautiful 1957 biopic about Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), a former racing driver and now owner of a car manufacturer on the brink of monetary collapse, is directed by Michael Mann, a filmmaker who, along with films like The Inaspectr, Ali, and Miami Vice, has proven his knack for propulsive, high-stakes dramas. That’s why it’s unexpected that much of the narrative here plays out like a two-stroke moped struggling to climb a hill. In all the teeth-chattering shots of the race, the camera searches over the shoulders of the driving forces as the road becomes blurry. Asphalt, it’s a film that ends up bogged down in other, less exciting things, like merger discussions, bank visits, and the tantalizing trail of accounting anomalies.
Part of the problem is that Driver, in his second performance as an Italian business patriarch after 2021’s House of Gucci, is a curiously muted and bloodless presence at the heart of the film. And the drivers – played by Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell and Patrick Dempsey, among others – are thumbnail sketches, making it hard to get invested in the question of who, if any, will wipe out. However, a terrific Penélope Cruz makes up for the lack of colour with her enjoyably strident turn as Ferrari’s permanently furious wife, Laura. She stomps through the film with a handbag stuffed full of cash and long-nurtured grudges, occasionally pausing to unload her revolver into the wall to emphasise a point.