Ptoo quietly at the Venice Film Festival and in the subsequent transition to cinema, Ferrari it is only apparently a conventional biopic. Directed by the great director Michael Mann, the film about the founder of the great racing team, with Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz, is a title worth rediscovering. The possibility there gives Rai 2 which will broadcast it this evening at 9.20pm.
Ferrari on Rai 2 tonight 16 January: plot of Michael Mann’s film
The film recounts a crucial and particularly difficult year for Enzo Ferrari. In 1957, ten years after its foundation, its business was in dire straits, with the risk of bankruptcy. Same fate for its private side: his marriage to Laura Garello is on the rocks following the premature loss of his twenty-four-year-old son Dino (who died the previous year) and the discovery that Enzo had a second son, Piero, born in 1945 from an extramarital affair with Lina Lardi.
Thus, for the entrepreneur it is time to go all out: his team enters four cars in the Mille Miglia, a 1600 kilometer race that crosses Italy. But death will still knock on his door.
Adam Driver in “Ferrari”
The review
The first images of the film set off the atmosphere that will dominate the entire story: a leaden climate, in which shadows invade interiors and exteriors. Enzo wakes up at his lover’s house and leaves in a hurry in his car to go home to his wife. The thrill of speed and the aura of death are inseparable and inherent in the protagonist and in the entire workmarked by several deaths, on and off the track.
In this context, the film paints an accurate portrait of Italy in the 1950s, in a Modena where all the attention is on football, racing and the Church. Mainly male attractions: in recounting Enzo’s family disputes, the subjugated condition of the woman emerges in particular, wife or lover, in tune with what the series has done recently The monsterset a few years later.
The Enzo of the film is a character that is difficult to empathize with, definitely not a role model. A greedy entrepreneur apparently cold in the face of death, lusting after women and cars, which he equally treats as objects. Convincing as always, the performance of his interpreter, Adam Driver, who immerses himself in the character with great identification. Ferrari it therefore escapes the conventions of biographical and sports filmslike the recent one F1- The movie: no racing epic, no heroes, just the raw reality and everyday life of men who defy death and pay a high price.
The cast and Favino’s controversy
Playing the protagonist we find Adam Driver, a long time subscriber to the great American filmmakers, who we recently saw in Father Mother Sister Brother. Just before Ferrarithe actor had played the role of another famous Italian: Maurizio Gucci in House of Gucci. A coincidence that had created a strong controversy at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Pierfrancesco Favino had in fact criticized the choice to entrust these roles to a foreign star: «In other eras, Gassman would have done Ferrari, but today Driver does it and no one says anything. It seems to me to be an attitude of contempt towards the Italian system.”
Let’s go back to the cast of the film. Penelope Cruz plays Lucia, Enzo’s wife. Shailene Woodley (Divergent, Big Little Lies), is instead Lina, the protagonist’s lover. Patrick Dempsey (the well-known Derek Shepherd of Grey’s Anatomy) is finally Piero Taruffi, a real-life Ferrari driver.