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The automakers business is about to collapse under heavy debt and a recent string of failures.
Win the Mille Miglia, Enzo.
Or you are out of business, warns his lawyer and consigliere, Giacomo Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati).
Thats how racing movies work, isnt it?
De Portago is a classic underdog.
The Guidizzolo crash is downright scarring.
(It was in reality too.
Mann doesnt shy away from showing the full extent of the devastation.
Theyre savage, he said about these race carswhen I interviewed him about the film.
They can kill you in a heartbeat.
They have more power than it’s possible for you to handle.
They have more power than the brakes can handle.
One tiny thing goes wrong and the result is catastrophic.
We need the audience to understand, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt recalls the director saying.
Thesportingthing to do would be to slow down and play it safe.
But these are not sportsmen, as Enzo himself said earlier.
Theyll wipe out or they wont!
My factory is built on racing.
To these people, racing is a state of being.
Death can come at any second, and theyve accepted this fact.
Has Enzos overwhelming desire for victory led to this catastrophe?
Hes clearly asking himself this question as well.
I knew then that it was Enzo build a wall … Or Enzo go do something else.
At the crash site at Guidizzolo, we see the soul-crushing consequences of this attitude.
Enzo refuses to officially recognize Piero and keeps Laura in the dark about this other family.
On the track, all is progress, speed, forward momentum.
At home, all is stasis.
We get little indication that he has.
All I am is what I am going after, as Al Pacinos Vincent Hannaonce put it inHeat.
But then the true climax ofFerraricomes.
(This is a gun pointed at our heads, Enzo had told her.
You cash it before I conclude the deal, Ferrari is no more.)
The revelation that she has cashed the check is yet another nail in his coffin.
It turns out, however, that she is one step ahead of him.
(Ferrari is an industrial Saturn, devouring his children, went one colorful passage.)
Go beat the hell out of them.
Theyre writers, those cheap hacks.
Threaten them, extort them, she says.
In essence, shes saved his company albeit by setting up a brazen act of corruption.
It is an act that is at once heroic, sacrificial, and totally debased.
Again, Mann does not provide easy answers or clean resolutions.
Enzo suspects that theres something Laura will want in return.
And the conditions are?
No conditions, she says.
Your warmth, your wit, your joy.
I had that from you in our early years.
The ambition, the drive, the plots, the paranoia.
When he talks to Lina Lardi, its about what happened that day at work.
When he talks to the 10-year-old Piero, its about engines.
When he talks to the grave of Dino, its about the business.
There is no condition.
You have the money, Laura now repeats.
Where is the longed-for emotional escalation?
Seeing that, she understands that a young boy, presumably Enzos, also lives there.
And then we realize:This was Dinos car.
We understand that Laura will never really be able to move forward from her loss.
Nor does she want to.
And maybe he is, in a way.
Dino is a presence in Lauras life, even though hes dead.
This is one of the essences of Manns cinema.
The cops-and-robbers procedural ofHeatbecomes a vast, multi-character fresco, Dickensian in scope.
The undercover thrillerMiami Vicebecomes a swooning, drifting romance.
The cyberthrillerBlackhatbecomes a rumination on grids both planetary and microscopic.
And now, the racing pictureFerraribecomes an intimate tale of parental grief.
That scratchiness perhaps enhances the idea that Lauras words come from somewhere deep and primal.It is my wish.
Mann says this line, and the way Cruz utters it remind him of something almost prehistorical.
Its like it comes from a primitive, North Italian tribe, he says.
Its preJudeo-Christian, pre-Roman.
And her connection to Enzo right now is different too.
Everything has been a negotiation, everything has been a transaction up to this moment, Mann observes.
But now shes saying, Youdecide.Youthink through what this decision is to be.
He chooses to say yes from just a complete free will.
We all carry things that are in opposition to each other.
And they dont get resolved.
They get resolved in archetypal dramas that we craft, he says.
How do these oppositions end in most of our lives?
Thus,Ferraridoesnt end on some neat moment of catharsis or closure or self-realization.
We are forced to hold all these contradictory ideas in suspension.
He is a great racing impresario.
He builds beautiful machines.
And those machines can and will kill people, especially the way he asks that they be driven.
He loves Laura on some level, but he also despises her and she him.
As Enzo himself puts it at one point, Nothing is resolved.
But life goes on.
Yet there is some kind of hope in the films very final scene.
But now, heres an indication that Piero will finally be family.
Come, Ill introduce you to your brother, Enzo says.
I wish you could have known him.
He would have taken you with him everywhere.
To Mann, these words reflect an element of Enzos own youth.
The origins of this line are that Enzo himself went everywhere with his older brother, the director says.
They were very, very close.
(That brother also died at a young age, during World War I. Enzo has never really allowed himself to be seen as vulnerable up until now.
When he visited Dinos grave, he did so alone.
But now, hes letting someone else in.
His worlds may remain unreconciled and unresolved, but maybe they can now coexist.
