If Ferrari is arguably Mann’s most flawed protagonist, he is also one of his most tragic – fully sold to a system that requires him to develop an almost inhuman indifference to life. By the film’s end, he is technically still on top, but at the cost of suppressing all emotion.
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In the breathtaking opening scene of Michael Mann’s Blackhat (2015), the camera takes us from a panoramic vision of Earth, seen from space – its atmosphere pulsating with seemingly infinite digital signals transmitting across nations, flows of information rendering geographical borders redundant – into the interior of a circuit board, an immaterial space visualized as an abstract wash of computerised light and colour. This bravura sequence encapsulates Mann’s late-career fascination with cutting-edge digital technology, as both a filmmaking tool and a subject of thematic exploration. One of the first mainstream directors to experiment with the format in the early 2000s, Mann used DV to shoot select sequences of Ali (2001) and Collateral (2004) before fully embracing it with Miami Vice (2006), Public Enemies (2009), and Blackhat. In each of these projects, Mann pushes the boundaries of digital cinematography, not merely to replicate the look of film but to uncover new aesthetic and affective possibilities.
Mann’s late work utilises HD digital cameras’ capacity for both hyperrealistic tactility and pictorial abstraction. His camera lingers on intricate surface textures, moving nimbly from detail to detail, and captures nighttime environments in remarkable depth using only diegetic lighting. At the same time, his images often appear smeary and pixelated, with proximity to the action deliberately distorting the on-screen space, creating an uncanny visual effect.
Mann’s late style is defined by a tension between the cold inhumanity of the digital apparatus and its potential to create a novel phenomenological engagement with the world. He achieves this by using the digital apparatus against its intended purposes, seeking out ostensible “flaws” and “fissures” in the images. This aesthetic imperative is mirrored on a thematic level, as Mann’s late projects consistently depict characters struggling to maintain their humanity in societies where surveillance is omnipresent, centralized systems of power treat individuals as data to be manipulated, and human life is subordinated to the international exchange of finance and trade. These concerns culminate in Blackhat, a film that, unlike Miami Vice and Public Enemies, envisions a world where digital technology can be repurposed to reclaim individual agency and resist the systems that seek to control us. In the earlier films, characters experience fleeting moments of joy by temporarily escaping the system, but they are ultimately drawn back into its flux. In Blackhat’s Hathaway, Mann envisions a true outlaw for the digital age – an individual whose preternatural skill at manipulating information technology allows him to move fluidly through the digital realm, evading the all-pervasive entities (national governments, private criminal enterprises) that seek to track him down and force him into submission.
Following the grandiose, hyper-modern intro of Blackhat, the opening of Ferrari, Mann’s long-awaited latest feature, may initially seem jarring. The film begins with grainy black-and-white archival footage of an automobile race, set in an unspecified part of the Italian countryside. This footage is accompanied by jaunty, period-appropriate jazz, creating a much lighter tone than anything else in Mann’s late work. When the director cuts to a close-up of one of the drivers, revealing footage of Adam Driver’s face visually superimposed onto the archival imagery, it may induce a slight pang of cognitive dissonance, but not enough to disrupt the scene’s upbeat tone. This is to say that Mann does not foreground this dissonance, the illusion that we are watching the character Enzo Ferrari (Driver) racing is sustained, and we are encouraged to become immersed within the diegetic historical world. The result is an undeniably romanticised portrait of the past – striking, because whenever Mann has depicted earlier eras before, he has filtered history through the lens of the present (as seen in Public Enemies, which applies HD cinematography to Depression-era Chicago).
While this opening may initially seem to be out of character for Mann, as the film jumps forward to Moderna, 1957, and introduces us to a much older Ferrari, now weighed down by decades of tragedy, familial strife, and professional regret, it becomes clear how the opening sequence fits into the larger narrative. This opening represents the romantic façade of the Ferrari brand, an alluring vision of technology as forward motion, excitement, and speed. Notably absent are any signs of the stunt drivers whose blood has been spilled in the process of manufacturing the cars, the shattered lives of those who lose loved ones to the sport, or the back-breaking labour required to sustain the business – this is the underside of the motor-racing industry that Mann spends the next two hours unpacking in painstaking detail. The automobile, so often fetishized in cinema as the embodiment of power, status, and idealized masculinity, is reconfigured by Mann as a symbol of the relentless, all-consuming capitalist machine – a system that pushes those striving within it to ever-greater levels of self-destructive productivity. They may believe they are gaining an advantage through their superficial success, but the moral compromises required to survive in this ruthless industry ultimately leave them feeling hollow.
Following the exuberance of the opening scene, the tone and formal language of the film shifts considerably. We fade in to a series of landscape shots at dusk, the trees appearing as silhouettes against a muted, earthy palette of juniper greens and dark yellows. The scene transitions to the interior of Ferrari’s home: he stirs, checks his watch, gives a perfunctory kiss to his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), who barely acknowledges his presence, then pulls the sheets over his sleeping son, Piero. Mann’s camera lingers on a line of toy cars on the boy’s shelf – an indication that he is being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. The sequence is wordless, the soundscape dominated by the tragic tones of Daniel Pemberton’s score. The first break in this auditory stillness occurs when Ferrari starts his car. Mann cuts to close-ups of the steering wheel, the accelerator, and the indicator, while the sound of the engine revving is dialed up, overpowering the ambient landscape noise – similarly to how Mann amplified the sound of gunfire in Heat (1995). Already, it’s evident that Ferrari’s devotion to his vehicles eclipses all other aspects of his life.
Mann’s protagonists often try to compartmentalize their private and professional lives until the inevitable collision leads to destructive consequences. Here, however, Ferrari’s business is intrinsically tied to the domestic sphere. His wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), owns half the shares in the company and refuses to grant him power of attorney over her shares unless he provides her with a check for $500,000 – a sum large enough to bankrupt the company. Later, Laura revises her stance, and the interconnection between the personal and professional spheres becomes even more difficult for Ferrari to navigate: on discovering his affair and his illegitimate son, Piero, Laura offers to return the money and grant him power of attorney on the condition that Piero is not legally given the surname Ferrari until after her death. She has an understandable rationale for this request: Laura and Ferrari’s only son, Dino, tragically died after years of suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and she views it as an insult to his memory to pass the family name to another child. As we learn, Ferrari regards his inability to save Dino as a personal failure. He had promised Laura that his wealth, influence, and determination would save their son, yet despite devoting years to seeking out the world’s best doctors and treatments, Dino’s fate was ultimately beyond his control. For a man so committed to orchestrating every outcome through meticulous planning and sheer force of will (“I must have total control,” he bluntly tells his attorney at one point, referring directly to business matters but also encapsulating his attitude toward his personal relationships, his treatment of his staff, and his approach to engineering vehicles), this was a devastating blow. While Laura expresses her grief through outward displays of sorrow and anger, Ferrari, outwardly stoic, channels his grief into an ever-intensifying obsession with exerting an exacting level of control over every aspect of his work.
The tragic irony is that this compulsion for total control, exacerbated by his inability to save Dino, drives Ferrari to impose unreasonable, almost sociopathic demands on the young men in his employ. He feels no sense of responsibility when their lives are lost in pursuit of his relentless quest for perfection. Mann’s protagonists are typically idealists – isolated dreamers who feel out of place in their world and yearn for some form of transcendence, even if they cannot articulate the nature of their discontent. What stands out about Mann’s portrayal of Ferrari is his cold, calculating capitalist nature, a man willing to send others into life-threatening situations to achieve his professional ambitions. Worse, he demands that his employees adopt the same ruthless mentality. In one memorable scene, he tells his drivers that representing the Ferrari brand requires “brutal determination” and a “cruel emptiness in their stomachs.” He adds that any loyalty they feel should not be to the brand or their colleagues but to their own pathological need to win at all costs. Ferrari’s near-sociopathic fixation on winning is demonstrated when he tells them:
On the straight into the tight corner at Nouveau Monde, there’s only one line through it. Behra pulls up next to you, challenging. You’re even. But two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time. Behra doesn’t lift. The corner races at you. You have perhaps a crisis of identity: “Am I a sportsman or a competitor? How will the French think of me if I run Behra into a tree?” You lift, he passes. He won, you lost! Because at that same moment, Behra thought, “Fuck it, we both die.”
This all-consuming drive to perfect their chosen craft is a common trait amongst Mann’s protagonists across his body of work. What distinguishes Ferrari, however, is that he also projects these demanding standards onto others. Ferrari’s brutally efficient approach to running the company is evident throughout the film. In an early scene, he is approached by the ambitious young athlete Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) – who idolises the Ferrari brand – while overseeing a test run. Ferrari unemotionally rejects Alfonso’s plea to join the roster of regular drivers, informing him that there are no available spots on the team. Moments later, the vehicle on the test track veers out of control, killing the driver instantly. Without missing a beat, Ferrari turns to Alfonso and casually tells him to stop by his office on Monday morning. That evening, in bed, Lina questions Ferrari about the accident, asking if the deceased driver was a friend and whether Ferrari will miss him. He avoids answering these queries, which would humanise the driver, instead retorting that nothing he says can “bring the boy back.” The driver’s funeral is not shown, nor do we see his family mourning. Instead, Mann cuts to a scene in which Laura liaises with the company’s accounting team regarding the logistics of cancelling his scheduled salary payments. The business is ruthless, allowing no time to grieve for those lost. As in much of Mann’s work, the flow of capital, technology, and information here supersedes human life, and in order to survive in this environment, Ferrari, in his own words, must “build a wall.” However, the emotional wall he erects between himself and the outside world instils within him a profound sense of melancholy, even if he struggles to pinpoint the exact cause of his unhappiness.
How, then, does Ferrari’s idealism manifest? He is a dedicated craftsman, an aesthete who views his vehicles as art pieces – sculptures in motion. Like Frank (James Caan) in Thief (1981) or Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in Heat, he derives deep personal satisfaction from painstaking physical and intellectual labour, which is intrinsically tied to his sense of self. In typical Mann fashion, Ferrari is so consumed by his work that everything else in his life – his family, his emotional and physical well-being – takes a back seat. And like these earlier Mann protagonists, the joy comes from the work itself, not from the material rewards it brings. The moment when Ferrari seems most joyful is when he discusses the process of moulding metal with his young son, poring over an intricate diagram illustrating a car engine’s inner workings. “If something works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye,” Ferrari tells him, articulating his compulsion to unite science and aesthetics.
This gives Ferrari a sense of exaltation, while managing the practical side of his business brings him only stress. As Ferrari, Driver delivers an impressively interiorized performance, conducting his movements with a sense of subdued elegance. Many of Driver’s best performances display animalistic physicality, yet here he carries himself with an air of refinement, suggesting a deliberate effort on Ferrari’s part – he’s consciously built a persona that is integral to his brand. He is referred to as “Commendatore” by those around him and projects an aura of mystique. He is taciturn and enigmatic, avoiding pleasantries with his employees and instead getting straight to the point, telling them exactly what needs to be done to improve the vehicles’ performance. This studied emotional distance is both a product of the trauma he still feels from Dino’s death and a way of shielding himself from the searing pain of watching his drivers perish. Ferrari’s tunnel vision allows him to see his employees as cogs in a machine – parts to be fine-tuned, not individuals with their own hopes and inner lives.
Ferrari has no desire to escape this system; he is fundamentally tethered to it, despite it bringing him no real fulfilment. The film connects Ferrari’s state of being to a wider malaise rampant during the postwar economic boom in Italy. The traumas of the war are fresh in the collective psyche, yet industry and technology continue to surge forward without giving the people time to sufficiently grieve what was lost. The idea that capital and industry now occupy the centre of postwar Italian society is cemented in an early scene, where Ferrari watches a priest address a congregation in church. The priest speaks about the importance of the auto industry, even suggesting that if Jesus were alive, he would be a metalworker, not a carpenter. He bestows mechanics with a near-religious quality, musing on “the nature of metal, how it can be honed and shaped with your skills into an engine with the power to speed us through the world.” Modernity and the influx of capital are to be treated with reverence. Ferrari, in turn, has internalized this view of the engineer as a messiah-like figure, and this inflated self-image allows him to feel justified in putting others in jeopardy. A collective amnesia permeates the film, manifesting in the tension between the speed and ferocity of the racing sequences and the ever-present shadow of death that hovers over the action. Ferrari and Laura regularly visit Dino’s grave, often alone; Ferrari mentions losing both his brother and father in World War I, and he is haunted by the memory of two close friends who died while driving cars he designed (as he puts it, “in the metal I made”) in 1933 – an early tragedy that led him to vow never to become emotionally attached to his drivers again.
The film ends poignantly in the cemetery, with Ferrari bringing Piero to visit Dino’s grave for the first time. Ferrari expresses his wish that Dino and Piero could have had a brotherly relationship. Mann then cuts to a wide shot, with Ferrari and Piero small in the centre of the frame, dwarfed by the surrounding cemetery and the looming tomb that holds Dino’s body. It’s a subdued yet forceful reminder of the inevitability of death, and how Ferrari’s all-consuming focus on speed, forward motion, and modernity cannot shield his mortal body from time and decay. The races may provide a temporary distraction and a fleeting illusion of mastery, but in the end, everyone meets the same fate.
It’s easy to imagine a character like Laura being portrayed as a caricature of a scolding wife, but as realized by Mann and portrayed by Cruz, she is treated with far more nuance. Like Ferrari, she is traumatized by the death of their son, and her willingness to confront her emotions is, if anything, depicted as healthier than Ferrari’s reticence. Oscillating between deep-rooted grief and bitter resentment at Ferrari’s destructive ways of handling his trauma, Laura emerges as the emotional anchor of the film. One of the most striking moments is an extended, unbroken close-up of Laura’s face as she cycles through a series of difficult emotions at her son’s grave. Cruz imbues Laura with a sense of hardened resilience, revealing her strong business acumen and her ability to be an equal partner to Ferrari. She is astute enough to see through Ferrari’s lies, yet strong-willed enough not to lapse into the role of a passive victim of his infidelities. She regards Ferrari with a mixture of pity and disgust, cutting down to size the man whom most treat as an untouchable icon.
The one moment in which Ferrari’s emotions overwhelm him comes in a tour-de-force sequence where the three central characters – Ferrari, Lina, and Laura – listen to a performance of Verdi’s La Traviata. Ferrari and Lina watch from within the concert hall (sitting in separate sections), while Laura and Ferrari’s mother, Adalgisa, listen to a live broadcast at home. Mann intertwines close-ups of the characters’ silent reactions with shots of the actors on stage delivering the music, interspersed with flashbacks to key moments from the characters’ pasts: Ferrari and Laura playing with Dino in their bedroom; Ferrari’s brother, in full military uniform, boarding a train as smoke obscures his visage (presumably the last time Ferrari saw him); Ferrari walking with Dino in the sunlit Italian countryside; Lina nervously announcing her pregnancy to Ferrari amid the ruins of his factory, destroyed by artillery fire, followed by Ferrari’s rapturous embrace. Each flashback is brief and largely wordless, yet they convey a shared history between the characters, imbuing these moments with cumulative emotional weight. Mann’s intercutting, timed to the rhythm of the music and organized around dialectical contrasts – new life and death, unspoiled nature and modern industry, the ravages of war and the prosperity of the postwar economic boom – demonstrates Mann’s indebtedness to the icons of Soviet montage cinema, whom he regularly credits as major influences on the development of his style.
Art, here, provides a rare respite from the relentless rhythms of daily life for these characters, offering a moment of personal contemplation amid the entanglement of professional and personal dilemmas, and the cultural emphasis on forward motion. For once, they can reflect on moments of joy or sorrow from their past. Mann’s handheld camera draws incredibly close to the faces of the actors on stage, its proximity illustrating how their performances are born from reaching into their private lives for a public audience. In turn, their voices evoke deep mnemonic associations for those listening, creating a bridge between the performer and the audience’s most profound emotions. Yet, as the music fades out, Mann cuts to a shot of a race car’s wheels hurtling toward the camera, the roar of the engine overwhelming the soundscape. The characters must return to the grind.
Ferrari stands as a fascinating object within Mann’s wider body of work. More formally restrained and languid than his previous digitally shot projects, it nonetheless showcases his mastery of the form. While Mann’s digital camera remains in constant motion, its movements here feel weightier and more purposeful compared to the intentional skittishness of his earlier films. Tonally, the film aligns more closely with the melancholic tragedies of Mann’s late ’90s period (Heat, The Insider, 1999), though without the sprawling scope of those films. On the contrary, Ferrari is radically compressed, unfolding over the limited timespan of just a few months of Ferrari’s life. Little context is given at the outset, and the film closes without the sense of a definitive endpoint. It predominantly sticks to a single character’s perspective, foregoing the dual protagonists of earlier Mann films or the city-tapestry structure of Heat. In terms of tone and tenor, Ferrari recalls another uncharacteristically subdued late-career biopic from a major American filmmaker: Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2015). Like Pasolini, Ferrari condenses a public figure’s life into a short window of time, focusing on the practicalities of work (organizing press releases, sorting paperwork, discussing numbers), the mundanities of daily routine (shaving, dressing, attending church, getting a haircut), domestic matters, and the artistic process. Both films eschew the conventional three-act structure, instead embracing an approach that distils key moments from their subject’s life. All events are treated with equal importance, allowing larger thematic tensions and resonances to emerge. Though deceptively simple at first glance, Ferrari is, in fact, a vision that could only have been realized by a supremely confident master of their craft.
Ferrari is ostensibly a film about motor racing, but it doesn’t build suspense around the question of who will win. The racing sequences are masterfully crafted, exciting, and visceral; yet what animates these scenes isn’t the thrill of watching cars overtake one another, but the pervasive sense of danger radiating from these metal machines. Mann’s staging of these sequences largely eschews the typical language of POV shots, wide shots, and facial close-ups that dominate race scenes in films like Rush (2013) and Gran Turismo (2023). Instead, Mann crafts a frenetic montage style that rapidly alternates between tactile images of the mechanical textures of the vehicles as they are pushed to their limits (control pedals, clutches, gearshifts), fleeting glimpses of the surrounding landscapes (with particular focus on the road, the unforgiving tarmac that can kill with a single lapse of attention), and the fragile flesh of the drivers encased within these beasts. What drives these men to take such risks? How does it feel to exist in that fragile space between life and death? How are these states of excitement and terror intertwined? These are the questions Mann is interested in, and these racing sequences shed a light on them. For the drivers, racing elevates them to a near-transcendent state, an addictive thrill rooted in this very precariousness. They enter each race knowing that there’s a high probability that they won’t survive, yet the allure remains irresistible. Before Ferrari’s racers head out on the climactic Mille Miglia race, each is seen writing alone at a desk, penning a letter to a loved one in case they do not return. It’s a moment of disquiet before the final act, casting a sombre air over what is to follow.
In a more conventional film, the third act would have centred on the question of who will win the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile race across Italy that could spark a major revival in the company’s fortunes if won by one of Ferrari’s vehicles. Instead, Mann focuses on a tragic crash that occurs partway through the race, in which a Ferrari careens off the road and ploughs into a crowd of spectators, killing its driver and several onlookers in gruesome fashion. The scene is one of the most harrowing and viscerally disturbing of Mann’s career. Through a lengthy, slow-paced tracking shot, we witness severed limbs, entrails, and, most grotesquely, a body torn in half, stretched across the road. Mann’s staging of this sequence is frightening precisely because the mass destruction is triggered by something as trivial as a small piece of metal lying undetected on the road – the driver’s failure to notice a minor hazard. If he had glanced down a second earlier, lives would have been spared. From the moment the crash happens, the question of who will cross the finish line first becomes completely inconsequential. One of Ferrari’s drivers does eventually win, but the images of victory are intercut with the horrific aftermath of the crash – shots of dismembered bodies lying among shards of broken, twisted metal. The win, and the business opportunities that come with it, pales in significance to the horrific consequences of the collusion between metal, flesh, and asphalt, bringing to light how absurd Ferrari’s all-consuming obsession with the industry truly is. The victory is stripped of any sense of genuine triumph.
The final stretch of the film depicts Ferrari and Laura dealing with the aftermath, primarily focusing on managing the company’s public image. Even in the wake of such a large-scale tragedy, Ferrari cannot bring himself to show emotion. When he arrives at the crash site with his team, he marches through the devastated crowd, refusing to meet their gazes or acknowledge the mutilated bodies around him. Instead, he looks straight ahead, stating simply, “We’re here to collect the car.” Meeting with Laura afterward, she bluntly suggests that the only way to repair the brand’s image is to pay off the nation’s journalists. The potential financial hit from such an accident demands immediate damage control. There is no time to reflect on the morality of what happened, no room for questions of collective responsibility or mourning for the dead. Ferrari and Laura approach damage limitation with the same detached, analytical mindset with which they balance the company’s finances. If Ferrari is arguably Mann’s most flawed protagonist, he is also one of his most tragic – fully sold to a system that requires him to develop an almost inhuman indifference to life. By the film’s end, he is technically still on top, but at the cost of suppressing all emotion. He believes he has mastered the system by maintaining tight control over his place within it, yet fails to realize that his insatiable pursuit of perfection, both in cars and in expanding his business empire, will ultimately leave him with nothing but a profound melancholia.
