I'm going to watch the movie (for the forth or fifth time) "Ferrari" tonight. I never met the man in the flesh, and don't know anyone who has. And anyone who has, only met the Ferrari that Ferrari wanted them to meet. For me, the movie reveals what I think could be very true about who and how he was is his personal and professional life. And I think it is a great tribute to him, warts and all.
Man if he could see that 44 with those dreads blowing in the wind in that red car! Man would he be proud!
Boy is Ferrari a wonderful film. In a more honest time it should have swept the Oscar's. Driver and Cruz have such wonderful moments, alone and together. The scenes with Cruz at the bank and at the cemetary...and when she visits the mistresses house and steal the child's toy. The old woman who played Enzo's mother...her scenes with Driver and Cruz...her face and size and walk are alone worth an Oscar. The scene with the opera and all the characters visions during it...the primitive world of racing back then, the garages, the simple ways the cars were being built, the timing using stop watches, the sly business rivalry between Orsi and Enzo, the scenes where Ferrari and Elena set the dining table or do the dishes, Enzo's reliving his race days at he drives his Peugeot 403 and when he talks to his drivers at lunch. This is a movie about the passion of racing...it has an enormously better story than F1, and it doesn't need the bling and BS and Brad Pitt to sell it. Sadly it was overlooked for movies like Barbie...such is the nature of Hollywood today.
I just received the latest issue of Magneto. This quarter’s “50 Best” was car films. Inexplicably Ferrari didn’t make the list. I don’t think it’s as good as you do, but I would have had it around #20. They picked the right #1, though…..Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix.
Grand Prix was wonderful for all the things it did with cars...a truly ground breaking movie technically...but the human stories were just the usual old Hollywood mush. In terms of showing lots of car racing in footage that was real racing, I'd have to say LeMans...and partially because it left all the mush out of the picture and focused on the story of the the men doing their job of racing over a 24 hour period. The racing scenes in Ferrari were good but not great...they were adequate. Where the movie excells is in the telling of the human stories of Enzo and his family and closest associates. From that point of view, the screenplay was fantastic and the performances were as good as I have ever seen in a story about love and marriage. In this case, Enzo is torn between three loves...racing (which he never gets out of his soul), his loyalty to his first wife and the son they both lost, and his love for his young son and his mistress. What makes the part about the first wife so wonderfully powerful is that they are still partners and she actually controls his most personal love, the business that lets him go racing. And Mann's direction...the way he let the camera linger on the faces without anyone saying a word. Cruz's face when she stands before Dinos grave and without saying a word, relives her entire life with the the boy. This, as opposed to Enzo who keeps talking up a storm of words to Dino, trying to ward off his own grief that he finally surrenders to. And I love the arrangement Cruz and Enzo make at the end, and how he finally and silently gives the slightest nod of his head...chosing his cars over his only living son. Perhaps I am too close to acting and writing and directing in my own life to see it objectively as a car movie. To me, Ferrari is a spectical of the human heart.
