Warning: This article contains spoilers about the movie Ferrari!
Summary
- Adam Driver’s choice to use an Italian accent for Enzo Ferrari in the film “Ferrari” is an odd one, considering Ferrari didn’t speak English but could communicate in French.
- Winning the Mille Miglia race helped Ferrari stay afloat, but the film doesn’t explain what happened next. Public opinion remains positive despite the deaths involved.
- Enzo Ferrari had numerous affairs and was obsessed with sex, using affairs to fuel his desire and ego. He was known for crude behavior, but Adam Driver’s portrayal in the film does not depict these traits.
According to Motorsport, Ferrari’s F1 revamp needs a reality check in 2023, and Michael Mann reveals in his latest biopic Ferrari, starring Adam Driver as the irascible Enzo Ferrari, that in 1957, the brand was just as close to balancing on a similar knife’s edge when it came to competing at the Mille Miglia. In the intense racing drama, which vacillates between the mean streets of Ferrari’s personal and professional life, the man behind the car is no longer in the driver’s seat of his destiny. He sends drivers to their deaths on increasingly difficult and dangerous racecourses and cheat on his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) with equally calculated ruthlessness.
A great deal about the true story of Ferrari’s Enzo Ferrari seems larger-than-life, but truth is often stranger than fiction, and many of the more incredible aspects of his legacy actually happened. Still, certain creative liberties needed to be taken to communicate the message driving the film; everything about Enzo’s life was as obsessive as his automobiles. Mann’s consummate sense of cinematic tension and introspective struggle means that by the end of Ferrari, whether the film’s content is 100% accurate or embellished by the director’s taut sense of melodrama, it’s the expert blending of both that ensures it crosses the finish line with flying colors.
8 Enzo Ferrari Didn’t Speak English
Adam Driver Goes For a More Restrained Italian Accent
After testing the water in House of Gucci, Adam Driver once again goes for an Italian accent in Ferrari. Enzo Ferrari didn’t speak English, but could communicate in French, making Driver’s choice (or rather, Mann’s) for the steely Enzo to speak in a clipped Italian accent an odd one. Neither Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October, Harvey Keitel in The Duelists, or Chris Pratt in The Super Mario Bros. Movie decided to ditch their native accents and cadences for their roles despite playing characters from other parts of the world, so the precedent has been set, but it should be noted Driver doesn’t sound cartoonish or embarrassingly stereotypical.
7 The Mille Miglia Was Supposed To Be Ferrari’s Make Or Break Point
Nobody Seems To Care Once It’s Over
Fans who know their Ferrari history know that the success of winning the Mille Miglia helped the company stay afloat, but it didn’t absolve Ferrari of all his financial issues. Winning the highly prestigious race was supposed to help sell more luxury cars, but the film ends abruptly before explaining exactly what happened next, and it seems like public opinion is positive despite all the carnage from the deaths. Enzo’s wife pays off the press with $500K and absolves the Ferrari name, implying that the Italian government was corrupt enough to look the other way, and her astute PR plan was a great contrast to Enzo’s poor response.
6 Italy’s Strict Divorce Laws Prevented Enzo Ferrari From Acknowledging His Other Son Piero
It Wasn’t Just Enzo’s Promise To Laura
After the death of his son Dino, Enzo Ferrari had a son with his mistress Lina Lardi named Piero, who was born in 1945 and kept a secret. In Ferrari, there’s a touching moment when Laura, who tolerated Enzo’s affairs but treated fostering another family as the ultimate sign of betrayal, tells Enzo he can’t acknowledge Piero until after her death, which occurred in 1978. More accurately, it was Italy’s strict laws about divorce that prevented Enzo from leaving Laura altogether and embracing Piero, though some script at the end of the film explains how Piero would eventually come to assume a position of authority in his father’s company.
5 Enzo Ferrari Did Sell His Company
Ferrari Almost Went Out Of Business
Enzo Ferrari founded his company in 1947, well after he’d raced for, and managed the team of, Alfa Romeo from the mid-1920s until the 1930s. But by 1957, Ferrari was about to go bankrupt, and the factory output wasn’t sufficient to cover the exorbitant cost of having a racing team. Enzo’s accountant explains that he’ll need to win the Mille Miglia or sell the company – well, ten years after that, Ferrari did sell 50% of Ferrari to Fiat to acquire the cash infusion necessary to keep his team and continue to manufacture some of the world’s most expensive cars.
4 Enzo Ferrari Was Obsessed With Sex
His Biography Reveals He Had Numerous Affairs
According to the book on which Ferrari was based, Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, Enzo considered his first marriage a strictly legal arrangement. He was obsessed with sex, and used affairs to not only fuel his carnal desire, but feed his prodigious ego. While Ferrari primarily focuses on Ferrari’s wife and mistress (Shailine Woodley), he had many “sexual conquests” and was known to date a range of “flashy, often trashy women,” (sometimes three at a time) feeling that, “when a man tells a woman he loves her, he only means he desires her…the only perfect love in this world is that of a father for his son.”
3 Enzo Ferrari’s Demeanor Was Often Crude
He Was Known To Have Horrible Table Manners
As Enzo Ferrari, Adam Driver portrays the car mogul with predatory grace and guile, and while his callous demeanor could be considered crude, he doesn’t embody some of the uncouth behavioral traits for which Enzo was known. Elsewhere in Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, Brock Yates notes that Enzo was known to belch loudly at dinner and even scratch his private areas at business lunches. Had Driver attempted any of these idiosyncracies, his depiction might have felt a little more human, and a little less mechanical, but that might not have been what Mann was striving for in his analogy.
2 The Mille Miglia Crash Is More Graphic (But Not By Much)
Michael Mann Took Some Liberties With The Violence
One critic in particular was notoriously harsh about the Mille Miglia crash scene at the end of Ferrari, when Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago watches helplessly as his front tire explodes at 150 miles per hour, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. He’s killed instantly when his car strikes a telephone pole, but it eventually jumps between a brook and the pavement, hitting several spectators on either side, for a total of 13 deaths. Adam Driver shut down the critic for calling the crash “cheesy” because of its almost comedic level of graphic violence, which indicates Mann’s desire to symbolically show two parts of Enzo’s life colliding gruesomely.
1 Enzo Ferrari Faced Manslaughter Charges
The Movie Glosses Over The Trial
The narrative engine of Ferrari is the 1,000 mile long Mille Miglia which, even though Ferrari wins, doesn’t come at a price to his reputation and his pocketbook. The success of the race was supposed to help him sell more cars, but because one of his drivers caused 13 deaths, Italian courts tried to pin manslaughter charges on Enzo Ferrari, citing the fact that his car didn’t have the proper tires to navigate the racecourse. The section on Ferrari having to battle the courts could have helped give extra context for the film’s abrupt ending but by that time, Ferrari’s long run time already threatens to affect the pace.