”I build engines and attach wheels to them,” Enzo Ferrari famously once said.
The latest Michael Mann film about the titular historical figure foregoes the decade-spanning big budget biopic treatment choosing instead on a particularly turbulent year, 1957 to be exact, in which the legendary entrepreneur and founder of the iconic automobile marque risked forfeiting everything he had built.
An ongoing rivalry with Maserati is at the epicentre of a crisis, in which his finances, family and racing cars are being pushed to the limit.
His “terrible joy”, as he calls motor racing, gives context to the shadow of danger that follows around his genius.
Ferrari is as much a movie about process as it is the endeavours of ego. At one stage Enzo, seeking feedback on how the new car handles, is simply told “good” from Alfonso de Portago.
But Ferrari, as he points out to the driver, thinks in terms of tangible things that matter — brake wear, steering, suspension, gear ratios.
“This is not,” a question he explains of “‘How was lunch?’ ‘Good.’”
Typical work in the trades, as philosopher Matthew Crawford has illustrated, requires more intellectual engagement with reality than the usual white-collar job.
Ferrari’s cavalier persona and drama infused private life, notwithstanding, can’t mask this.
In the world of mechanics and engineers, let’s call them industry practitioners, no one can fake it until they make it. The world of multi-tasking after all is one of distraction.
It lacks for obsessive engagement.
The movie time and again asks us to understand Enzo as a force of nature, whose ideas, for better or worse, cannot be contained even by the same laws that define it.
In Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger, a character, in fondly recalling a Dodge, equipped with a souped-up Hemi, drolly nails down the concept: “It would pass everything but a fillingstation,”
A project in the works since the mid-1990s, Ferrari, doesn’t so much demystify the eponymous figure but chip away the sheen of the statue’s marble casting.
Enzo, after all, helped promote the myth of branding as much as anyone.
A photo opportunity yields one memorable comic interlude when Enzo, sandwiched between a driver and the driver’s new model girlfriend, pulls her closer to him.
While the movie does little to dispel the persistent rumours that he was a ladies’ man, the act here is funny because the prancing horse logo, which she is unintentionally covering up, comes first.
There’s also a touching scene with his illegitimate son, the subject of major scandal in the movie and also his life, in which Ferrari pores over a blueprint of an engine.
He explains to the child the necessity for a slippery intake manifold by asking the child to imagine he’s inside it so he can comprehend the critical movements of fuel and gases, sparked into rapid expansion.
As Enzo adjusts the curvature in the design with a pencil, the child approves, saying it looks better.
“I have a secret to tell you,” his father explains. “In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.”
Even the Bishop of Modena during mass, wonders if Jesus had been alive at the time whether he would be a metal craftsman rather than a carpenter.
An awesome and sobering crash later in the movie will give Enzo occasion to momentarily indulge his own sense of martyrdom. On the frontier, beyond the comfort of what is accepted, there’s a price to be paid.
It’s almost as if Enzo wears dark glasses to cut down the glare of his expansive, terrible vision.
In this case, the product of that vision, the engine, as the Bishop describes it, holds “inside a fire to make power to speed us through the world.”
And perhaps, as we embark on a new era, worlds to come.
