Ferrari

Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari and Patrick Dempsey as driver Piero Taruffi in “Ferrari.” Photo via IMDB

Even if he didn't have the perfect name for the job, after seeing “Ferrari” it's hard to picture anyone other than Adam Driver starring in it. 

This despite the fact he's 20 years younger than Italian automotive icon Enzo Ferrari was during the film's 1957 time frame. After being part of “The House of Gucci” ensemble, Driver had the accent down. He just had to dye his hair gray and add some prosthetics to more closely resemble the former race driver now struggling to keep his storied company afloat.

Disregard the contrived brouhaha that the role should have gone to an Italian actor – Driver nails it.

The studio is billing this as a mix of “Grand Prix” and “The Godfather,” thanks to its gorgeously recreated Italian settings. Race tracks. Colorful villages. The streets of Rome. Dimly lit opulent interiors. 

It's Vroom with a View. 

The venerable Michael Mann, who pioneered using automobiles as co-stars with the human actors in “Miami Vice,” is a natural to direct.  He has a whole toy box to play with in the voluptuously sculpted, ridiculously loud and powerful fleet of red racing machines embossed with the Ferrari stallion emblem.

In their leather jackets, cigarette in one hand, blond magazine cover girl on the other arm, the drivers – including Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi – were the rock stars of the era on tracks across Europe. But in Italy, Enzo Ferrari towered above them major domo style, alpha to the max, ramrod straight, always impeccably dressed in suit and tie, every gray hair in place above his signature sunglasses.

Racing, it turns out, was less daunting than keeping the company books in the black. 

That job fell to his fiery wife and partner Laura (Penélope Cruz). She managed the business side of the factory whose client list favored wealthy playboys and Middle Eastern sheiks.As opposed to rivals like Jaguar, for whom racing was good for selling cars, the Ferrari factory sold (a lot less) cars in order to support Enzo's lethal addiction, the passion for speed and checkered-flag victory. 

Unfortunately for volatile Laura who keeps a pistol in her nightstand, when Enzo's heart isn't at the track, it's in the villa he provides for Lina (Shailene Woodley), the “other woman” he adores, along with their son Piero.

The Ferraris' marriage is as combustible as the cars precipitously fueled with huge funnels in the pit stops. Passions are most inflamed – and Driver and Cruz's performances at their best – when they're fighting.

Most of the excitement though, comes from the cars, especially in the grueling 1,000-mile Mille Miglia road race across Italy. The late Brock Yates – legendary in automotive culture for decades – co-wrote the script before he died in 2016. Director Mann shares Enzo Ferrari's obsession with every detail of these miraculous machines, putting us in the cockpit in one second, sending us soaring high above the undulating roadways in the next, turning it all into visual poetry.

“Ferrari” takes its place this awards season in a crowded field of mid-20th-Century period pieces, several of them about sports. Time is not necessarily on their side. The events they depict are too close to be historical, but feel dated and quaint in today's world. For all the mechanical sex appeal Ferraris conjured in the '50s, the cars on-screen – not to mention the Alfa Romeo and Fiat sedans the characters drive away from the track – look slightly cartoony in 2024.

When Francis Ford Coppola created the “Godfather” trilogy, it was a seminal, organic process. The images, moods and textures came from a place deep in his soul to spring to life cinematically. The movie screen was his Sistine Chapel ceiling on which to paint his masterpiece.

Imitation may be a form of flattery and homage, but borrowing so much “Godfather” imagery and screen craft – opera on the music track, cuts back and forth from Catholic ritual to real-world dangers – inadvertently creates a race in which “Ferrari” comes in second.

“Ferrari” has the added burden of being about real people – granted, larger-than-life members of a dynasty rather than a mere family. “The House of Gucci” met a similar challenge with operatic, over-the-top strokes, painting its characters as clowns and buffoons when warranted. Aside from Enzo 's sardonic one-liners, “Ferrari” doesn't have much of a sense of humor.

Enzo wasn't an amoral godfather, but wasn't a particularly likable guy, either.

He was just a captain of industry who never outgrew a boyish delight in going fast, engaged in a sport where victory comes at a high price indeed.