To be nine years removed from Michael Mann’s last feature, Blackhat feels like a near-decade of missing out on continuing a conversation with one of the great American filmmakers of our lifetime. Although he had spent most of that time between Blackhat and his newest film, Ferrari, conceptualizing, writing, and releasing Heat 2 as a novel to reemerge into public consciousness, Mann’s absence from the cinema was felt the moment Ferrari began. The work-obsessed filmmaker from Chicago has stimulated viewers for decades with captivating thrillers and seismic dramas that have enjoyed everlasting life throughout the cable market, and now, the pillars of streaming (a rather succinct allegory for his evolution as a filmmaker). With films as monumental as Thief, The Last of the Mohicans, and Heat in an oeuvre, Michael Mann’s name goes a long way when discussing his place in film history as one who continuously challenged the form by welding it to his will.
Mann’s will to shape his characters by the Midwestern state of mind is an extension of his gruff philosophizing on the personal connections he made with the class of men he associated with. Men identified as dreamers and shapeshifters, work-obsessed entrepreneurs of self-made opportunity handcuffed by the structures of the law or prison that grew between the desires of American men and the thorns of capital puncturing what they’re chasing after. In Ferrari, that style hasn’t changed much, as Mann captures audiences with the emotional energy that has propelled us to have out-of-body experiences only the cinema can provide.
The blueprints of Ferrari detail a portrait framed by the cosmic realism that Mann is most known for, but in this instance, the impulses of his past have been exchanged for something more wise and dynamically intimate. There is a categorical ‘want’ for each character, but the ‘wants’ of Ferrari aren’t shaped by aspirations, they’ve already been achieved - lived and remembered. This allows Mann to navigate the moral compass of Enzo Ferrari by inverting the type of man at the center of his stories. When we enter Mann’s domains, the characters we meet are pursuing a future that has yet to be realized, but Enzo actualizes his dreams with Laura and Dino before the film starts. So, we’re situated with Enzo amidst the wake of his collapsed dreams being forced into the fault lines of memory that quake with turmoil.
We have yet to see Mann toil with the emotional ramifications of memory on a scale this big, and he visualizes it with digital cinematography only he could manage. As one who leaped toward the digital dawn at the turn of the century, he has fully expressed himself as he always wanted to. Low-level lights shape the interior spaces of his characters and sets, magically fluorescent depth in the exterior backgrounds that often casts a starry curtain over his worlds, and some of those traits are here, but it’s the warm hills of Italy he characterizes this time around. The shards of sunlight peer through the dark-tinted sunglasses that act as masks in Mann's features, and through this he can explore the inner depths of the characters’ pain that decorates their face behind them. He allows the light to caress their faces so the thoughts of Adam Driver (Enzo) and Penelope Cruz (Laura) come out from within, and no mask can prevent sunlight from highlighting the anguish in their eyes. From Driver’s narrowed thoughts looking beyond his pointed nose, or Cruz’s glassy mirrors of reflection boiling with tears, Mann uses his digital sunlight to burn a spotlight on two performances that could not be more well cast. Awards are trivial, but this caliber of work should not go unrecognized for how staggering both are. You couldn’t dilute either of them into a trophy anyway.
Many will leave Ferrari with their thoughts attached to the few sequences in the film that have to do with racing, but it’s the space between those scenes that elevates the significance of the sound that courses around the room. In some manner, the churning pistons, intake chambers, rumbling exhausts, and fuel-injected tanks are the mechanical extensions of what is waiting to be said between Enzo and Laura. Like cars, people are a compilation of parts too, and the power we can exert could be just as loud or motivated by an engine that thirsts for fuel so that we may continue to operate appropriately.
The dinner tables, bedrooms, desks, and phone calls are tracks where the characters can maneuver around the room, jousting with each other through verbal cues, and the screams, cries, and gestures are as intense as a speeding vehicle. The sound mix plays such a vital role in allowing Mann to shape his images around the audible points of contention between these people that let the ‘action’ beats pulse with the plumes of exhaust that billows from the mouths of the story. Mann is spectacularly mindful of the technical aspects of filmmaking, and his ability to continuously attribute new mannerisms to challenge his form is one of his greatest strengths as a storyteller. He recognizes that drama isn’t contingent on plot, but rather through the bursts of the audience reacting to his camera being able to formulate shimmering vibrations of images that feel movingly spiritual just as they are technically configured.
Ferrari might avoid the minutiae of Enzo and Laura growing into empirical wealth in post-war Italy, or refrain from lengthening the runtime to tie a bow on every thread, but what Mann does capture is the vessels that course throughout this crater of history. In a sense, he exchanges cosmic realism for Italian neorealism, so that he may elevate this single moment in time as a vigorous expression of humanity being pushed to categorical limits by their surroundings rather than the intangible pressures of fate. Like the rest of his work, it’s his liberal defiance of capital threats on the mental and physical well-being of sportsmen, dreamers, and families, but he provokes these ideas from the perspective of the exploiter rather than the exploited.
In Ferrari, Enzo is the exploiter, and Mann’s clever inversion of his craft is a tantalizing pivot for the filmmaker who has punched up at the Proskys and CBS Corporates of the world. These are villains that strip freedom from the people who work for them by insisting a workplace mindset outweighs any impulsive, human decision within the environments that they’ve built for them. In Enzo’s case, his environment is a rumbling metal coffin for his drivers, and the tracks and cockpit are not too different from the firearms that cut people down.
In one of the greatest moments of his career, Mann has Enzo work through the remains of a sports car like an autopsy of dismembered limbs, but the camera refuses to let him engage with the lives that were lost in the crash. At this time, all that is on his mind is the corporate-level business that could tie his name, his brand, to tragedy, and eliminate an inevitable sale despite the glory of victory. Michael Mann understands that the spiritual desire for a life outside of work will always be turned against us by the exploits of calloused labor, and our capital lords have engineered spaces for us that will do us more harm than good. No matter how considerate we are of our bodies so that we may walk toward a horizon brimming with potential life when we show up to work, we’re dressing for our funeral. No amount of glory could salvage the remains of our bodies, but Mann’s craft insists that the cinema is the only mode of extracting our soul from within without totally removing it from the husk of our body. Michael Mann movies are a disciplined, candid force of power generating spectacularly universal emotions out of fear for what capital may take from us, and Ferrari is a handwritten letter that foreshadows a world where the remnants of valuable metals sever the physical status of our being.