Review: ‘Ferrari’ stars Adam Driver as the Italian automaker — at times it feels stuck in second gear

Add up Michael Mann’s many decades and finest hours as a filmmaker, and it’s clear the Chicago native has done a lot for us, along every kind of road. The nightscapes of “Thief,” “Heat” and “Collateral.” The antiseptic cubicle paranoia of “The Insider.” The digital breakthroughs, even before our eyes were ready for them, in “Ali” and “Miami Vice.” His directorial elegance, flecked with violence and a kind of rapturous loneliness, is all his. And his latest, “Ferrari,” Mann — now 80 — brings a long-gestating portrait of Italian automaker Enzo Ferrari to completion.

Parts of it are first-rate; parts of it are routine. As Ferrari, Adam Driver manages a dutiful, careful but indistinct performance on the heels of his last high-profile Italianate turn in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci.” Some biopics over-worry about turning their leading players into physical likenesses of their subjects (Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, for example, in “Vice”). That’s one way to go. Another is the “oh whatever” route, relying on performance persuasion and a little less latex. In the Mann realm, the second option was taken for Johnny Depp’s sorta-kinda-similarity to the real, though rougher-looking, John Dillinger in “Public Enemies.” Or Driver’s not-at-all resemblance to the real Ferrari, age-wise or otherwise, in “Ferrari.”

The late screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin’s storyline (Martin died in 2009) focuses on the Ferrari crises of 1957, when the auto legend and former racer was about to go under. Broke. Overextended. Longtime younger lover (Shailene Woodley, disappointingly flat in a two-dimensional part) and publicly unacknowledged preteen son (Giuseppe Festinese) in one villa; long-suffering wife and business partner Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz, the movie’s MVP) seething and scowling in another. Her husband’s rampant philandering is well-known to Laura; Enzo’s artfully compartmentalized secret life and son are not.

Amid scrambles for outside cash, trips to the opera and trysts in between, “Ferrari” builds to the fearsome Mille Miglia (Thousand Miles ) motor race across Italy’s winding, mountainous roads, scarily narrow urban streets and in all kinds of weather. A win can save Ferrari and his company, under pressure. And here is where Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, paradoxically, relax and enjoy themselves, shooting in mostly practical (not-effects-driven) ways along beautiful stretches of road. They strap cameras to the Ferrari beauties, low to the ground the way the movies have done for a century. At its visual peak, Mann’s film relishes the near-abstract imagery of rainy asphalt and headlights slashing the night sky.

The nonverbal passages provide relief from dialogue that goes clunk-a-doodle-do, with an uncertain mixture of humor and, well, not-humor. “You know the rule!” Cruz’s Laura says to cheating Enzo early on. “You have to be here before the maid arrives with the morning coffee — that was the agreement!” A pretty good line, actually, but at odds with the movie’s frequent solemn pronouncements. Great drivers such as those on the Maserati team, Ferrari tells his crew at one point, have a “cruel emptiness in their stomachs.” (That one would sound better in subtitled Italian.) By 1957, the married Ferrari couple was in deep mourning for their son, Dino, who died the year before of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Since that piercing loss, Laura says to Enzo, she has had to settle for less and less of her husband, mostly “the ambition, the drive, the plot, the paranoia.”

Cruz is spectacularly good throughout, activating Laura’s rage, sadness and contempt for her situation (and their auto company’s finances) in every scene. Even throwaway bits register; the movie’s tensest confrontation, in fact, hinges on Cruz’s impatience with a faulty ballpoint pen handed to her by a shifty bank teller. But Driver, so effective so often in recent years, does not suggest much ambition, drive, plotting or paranoia. He’s going for a man who has his public image to maintain, even in private. And that doesn’t do quite enough for the movie. The masterly editor Pietro Scalia may have erred a bit here in letting too many of Driver’s sullen verbal rejoinders sit on screen for a second or two too long, before cutting to Cruz, or Patrick Dempsey (as Enzo’s longtime friend and driver, Taruffi), or Woodley’s mistress Lina, who met Ferrari during the waning, brutal days of World War II.

So: mixed bag. But I wouldn’t mind seeing “Ferrari” again sometime just for Cruz, and for a few of Mann’s most gratifying examples of classical Hollywood technique, done his way. The movie reinvents no wheels. But it sure knows how to film ‘em.

“Ferrari” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language)

Running time: 2:11

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Dec. 25

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune