Rewatching Ferrari, or how to start a year

If you watch enough movies, soon enough your year gets divided up by release dates. Pre- and post-Oscars might be the most obvious line of demarcation, but there’s also the festivals (if and when you’re lucky and able to go), and the general cadence of the year as the industry trudges from January doldrums through to the Memorial Day kickoff of summer movie season to those first fall whispers of the year’s new crop of prestige releases to the December gauntlet.

Then there are the events, the major releases that are only major for one. These are the moments where you see something new or perfect or new and perfect—a recency-biased list of my own would include before and after Parasite, or Barbenheimer, or Dune Part One, or Cloud Atlas (I’ll explain later)—and you feel the need to reshape your understanding of film form and tone and your consumption therein.

Today wasn’t one of those days. I went in to Michael Mann’s Ferrari having already enjoyed it during its closing night premiere at NYFF—credit card debt is a real gem—and coming away more impressed than I was before. Mann’s film, which one could equally describe as “a searing portrait of masculine self-imprisonment, equal parts incentive and reflective of Mann’s previous works” or “Crisis! at the Mille Miglia,” benefits a lot from a second watch, even in a random AMC in central Indiana on New Year’s Day with your partner’s family and a guy who won’t shut the fuck up sitting somewhere behind and to the left of you.

The movie is good approaching great, let down by some treacly-at-times dedication to the biopic as genre, a middling score, and the utter dearth of feeling or personality that Shailene Woodley’s Lina Lardi possesses. Beyond having a second chance to admire the measured, careful performance of Penélope Cruz as Laura Ferrari, I think I better appreciated the extent to which Enzo Ferrari’s (Adam Driver, pawing at an Italian accent and packed with enough mannerisms to drive a drama major wacky) exhortation to his drivers about two objects at speed not occupying the same point in space at the same point in time applies not just to Enzo, but to the whole cast of this movie. Everyone is living some kind of double life, and in this one town in Italy in 1957, everyone had to choose which life won out. Lift and coast, or floor it.

The point, ultimately, is that I wanted Ferrari, my first movie of 2024, to reveal something new and spectacular on this rewatch, something that makes it worthy of a pre- and post-watch distinction. But it’s not that. It’s good, don’t get me wrong—Mann is never an uninteresting director, and there’s enough plot and character to chew on for a while–but it isn’t revelatory or utterly special or in need of reclamation. Few things are. Most things, if we’re lucky, will be just about fine.

Happy New Year.

-Luis