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"Ferrari"
It's the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino, a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) with Lina Lardi (Shai lens Woodley). Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.
Passion, ambition, power, the characteristics of Enzo Ferrari racecars came from within the man himself. From the beginning, they began to dominate the competition and fire imaginations worldwide. Born in Modena, Italy, the former racecar driver and team manager formed his own company in 1947. Built with almost no funding, Ferrari’s first car in its sixth race won the Rome Grand Prix. By 1957 the world’s greatest racers were vying for seats in Ferrari’s. Enzo and his wife, Laura, re-invested heavily in the racing division. As a result, by 1957 insolvency was stalking the factory. Meanwhile the tragic death of their only son, Dino, to mluscular dystrophy in 1956 has further shaken their rocky marriage. Dino was their center and future; now gone. Both grieve differently over the devastating loss. Meanwhile, Piero Lardi, Enzo’s son born in 1945 from his liaison with Linda Lardi, now seeks the acknowledgment of his father. Together they constitute a second family of which Laura is unaware until it’s revealed. As crises and revelations converge, Ferrari wagers all on winning one race, the supremely dangerous 1,000-mile race across open roads called the Mille Miglia.
We all know it’s our deadly passion, our terrible joy. But if you get into one of Ferrari cars, and no one is forcing you to take that seat, you get in to win. Enzo Ferrari is one of the most famous, yet inscrutable and complex men of the 20th century. “Ferrari” moves behind the inscrutable image of the iconic Enzo Ferrari. Based on Brock Yates 1991 book 'Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine', the film is a character study. There's no equilibrium in his life, and that’s the whole point of Enzo Ferrari, because that’s more like the way life actually is. Ferrari was precise and logical; rational in everything to do with his factory and race team. In the rest of his life he was impulsive, defensive, libidinous, chaotic. The story is not a typical biopic. It seizes on the four months of Enzo Ferrari’s life, in 1957, when all the conflicts and fortunes, the drama of his and Laura and Lina’s lives come into focus. All the hurdles he faced in the mid-1950s, when motorsports was becoming a glamorous, international phenomenon. There's further duality in Ferrari’s life; his wife, Laura, was a woman hardened by struggle, grief, petrified love, and from being a woman involved in a business dominated by men.
An early deal with Ferrari meant that Laura is a 50/50 partner in the Ferrari factory, which became even more complicated when the couple’s personal life became messy and cold, and Laura’s savvy business instincts emerged as one of the few avenues of control she had. The power Laura had over the Ferrari company would anger Enzo, and yet, when his engineering staff once threatened to quit if Laura continued to make production visits at the factory, Enzo fired all of them, the world’s greatest automotive engineers, on the spot, immediately, out of solidarity with Laura. Still, Laura is invested in Enzo’s success and the Ferrari team’s wins on the track. Meanwhile, Enzo met, Lina Lardi, whom he had met in a factory his native Modena, Italy, during World War II, anchored his life. When their son Piero was born in 1945, Lina raised him in Castelvetro. She was a post-war Italian single mother focused on what was right for her child despite his being born out of wedlock at a moment in history, and in a country, that didn’t accept divorce. It's about providing a safe space for her son to feel like he belonged in a world that, during that time, especially in Catholic Italy, told anyone under those circumstances that they didn’t belong.
If Enzo Ferrari’s life was bifurcated into chaos and control, his life with Lina Lardi was a cause for one while embodying a desire for the other. When their affair began during the Second World War, Lardi had been working at a coachbuilding factory in Modena, and as Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s fascist policies and World War II ravaged Italy, Ferrari and Lardi’s relationship grew. In the disarray of post-war Italy and the hardships that followed, Lardi raised their son, Piero. Lina is a woman at the crossroads of two lives that existed outside of her own, and she was a bit helpless in that situation; all Lina could do was show support and love for her son and the man that she loved. In Lina’s most forthright moment in the film, she confronts Enzo on his hesitancy to acknowledge Piero with his last name (due to Laura’s legal maneuvers and Italian cultural considerations, Piero was not able to be acknowledged as a member of the Ferrari family until after Laura’s death in 1978). The complexities and emotions involved were tumultuous, but Lina’s view is that what matters most is what’s best for Piero, and that has loved by Enzo as his son.
The difficulty of having two families, and two homes, one filled with grief over the loss of a son who hadn’t lived past the age of 24, the other focused on making a 12-year-old boy’s life free from pain and want, crashes into Enzo Ferrari’s pursuit of engineering perfection. He sees all too clearly the risk of losing all he’s built, either to companies like Fiat and Ford who were looking to buy him out, or through personal issues that threatened to overtake his life’s work. In 1957, Ferrari was going broke; the company’s passenger car sales had dwindled as competitors began breaking his cars speed records, making it harder to secure funding. All of that fueled Ferrari’s competitive nature even more. Ferrari would take a huge gamble with the fortunes of his company by entering the 1957 Mille Miglia, the famous 1,000-mile, open-road endurance race through Italy that had begun in 1927. Thirty years after its inaugural race, it was about to collide with a form of blind ambition Ferrari isn’t ready to be accountable for. His aim, going into this dangerous race, is to put together a multigenerational, flashy driving team that would attract financing to keep the Ferrari factory in business, and which would allow Ferrari to maintain control. But the cost would be high.
Moving to the racetrack, chief among the team of drivers surrounding Enzo Ferrari would be Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), whose horrific crash in the final stretch of Italy’s Mille Miglia, which killed de Portago and nine spectators, would for decades overshadow the legacy of the race and be part of the reason it ended in 1957. Eugenio Castellotti (Marino Franchitti) dies while attempting to reclaim Ferrari’s speed record from Maserati. Sound is also crucial in the de Portago crash sequence. At the moment of impact, the sound almost disappears, leaving a dull, closed-ear vibe to the sounds that follow. The concept is to have the impact noises as the car is plowing into the pole and through the crowd diminish over time. Piero began working with his father in the late 1960s and collaborated with the company’s Formula One teams, as well as in the concept and production process, and other aspects of production. When Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, Piero inherited his father’s stake in the company. Piero served as president of the Ferrari company until 2015.
There's the world of Enzo’s more intimate, domestic life, at home with Laura or in the countryside with Lina, and then there's the world of racing. The former would be a more classically composed aesthetic, while the latter would be filled with visceral, dynamic energy often through handheld camerawork. Italian Renaissance painting is so informed by architecture and the natural light that Italian architecture of that period lends to a space. It’s all this single-source, directional lighting from the windows. As for the color palette, the yellows, oranges, pale greens and terracotta/ochre hues of Northern Italy set the template. The concept is to slash through that palette with the bright, primary red of the cars, signifying aggression and energy in the face of the more austere aesthetic elsewhere in the film. The cars are kinetic, they’re full of agitation. The film wants to show the experience of what it's to drive one of those cars and to be in a tense race, trying to master the forces. It's, by design, a counterpoint to the formality of the dramatic, dialogue-filled scenes. There are incredibly powerful human moments, then we’re roaring around Italy with drivers flirting with death. In so many places around the world, it’s still a very similar situation, working from the shadows and not being acknowledged for what they do, not being valued. It’s as if youve mild chronic pain, only it’s emotional, but it's important for us to see that represented in many ways, but especially physically. Life is asymmetrical. Life is messy. Life is filled with chaos.
Written by Gregory Mann
