“Am I a sportsman or a competitor?”
So Enzo Ferrari asks in 1957, and his drivers know better than to answer. To drive for Ferrari, you must be a competitor—bold and ruthless. Do not cede the racing line. Do not brake to let the other fellow squeeze past. “Brake later,” Ferrari says. “Steal their line. Make them make the mistake.”
They must be loyal to just one thing Enzo tells his men: “Loyal to the lust to win.”
Enzo knows that lust. As a driver himself in the 1920s, he embraced that appetite. As a racecar designer and developer in the 1930s, he reveled in it. And when he went on to create his own company in the 1940s, he breathed that lust in as if it was oxygen—and it consumed him in turn. To win was all.
The name Ferrari became a byword for all that people loved about racing: speed. Power. Beauty. The Ferrari badge—a black prancing pony on a yellow shield—became a symbol of national pride.
But by 1957, the prancing pony seemed to be slowing. Other European manufacturers were making gains. Fellow Italian brand Maserati was breaking Ferrari speed records and taking checkered flags.
And Ferrari itself? It was bleeding lira by the liter. Enzo sells too few cars to fund his racing habit. His accountants tell him that Ferrari will need to find a deep-pocketed partner—Ford, perhaps, or Fiat—to stay in the race. It’ll need to sell more cars. They point to the English car manufacturer Jaguar as a possible model, noting that each time Jaguar wins a race, its sales increase.
“Jaguar races to sell cars,” Enzo says. “I sell cars to keep on racing. We are completely different organisms.”
Yes, but the organism of Ferrari is growing more endangered by the month. Its books are covered in Ferrari red.
And Enzo has other concerns, too.
His wife, Laura, tires of Enzo’s affairs. His mistress, Lina, is pressuring him to acknowledge his illegitimate son, Piero, as a Ferrari.
With every turn in the road, Enzo finds obstacles. His adversaries are speeding up while he slows down.
But Enzo is no sportsman. He is a competitor. He will steal lines. He will brake last. He will wait for mistakes.
And he will push for the win no matter what it takes—or what it costs.
Certainly, the Ferrari marque is as legendary as any badge in the world of motorsports. Enzo Ferrari made it so, and few can doubt both his talent as a designer and his drive as a businessman.
But he’s also a surprisingly tender father to Piero, spending time with the boy, even teaching the child some rudimentary principles of engine design. And when Piero shows an understanding of those principles, Enzo is almost beside himself with pride.
Perhaps Enzo is so fond of Piero because he and Laura lost their own son, 24-year-old Alfredo “Dino” Ferrari, just the year before. Enzo visits Dino in the family crypt early in the film, and talks with him as if his son was sitting next to him. He admits to Dino that he’s “hearing voices in my sleep again,” those of two good friends who died 24 years before.
“I see you too, you know,” Enzo confesses. “Every moment I close my eyes.”
Enzo and several Ferrari execs attend the same Catholic church, and the priest knows it. “If Jesus had lived today and not 2,000 years ago … He would not have been a carpenter, but a craftsman in metal, like yourselves,” he tells his congregation. He talks about how Jesus would appreciate, as an “engineer,” the potency embodied in a car engine. And that, the priest says, “Is why we give thanks today.” But while the priest presides over the Eucharist, Enzo and his fellows are watching their stopwatches: Miles away, Team Maserati is attempting to beat Ferrari’s local course record.
When disaster strikes during a race, Laura says, “This is God’s way of punishing us.” Enzo has his doubts that God would kill innocent people simply to get at the Ferrari family. We hear references to the Pope a couple of times. Crucifixes hang on home walls, and churches and crypts are decorated with Christian art and symbols.
Lina presses Enzo to acknowledge Peiro as his son—in part because his confirmation ceremony is coming up. Enzo encourages Lina to get him out of confirmation by telling everyone that Piero lost his faith in God.
One of Ferrari’s drivers, Alfonso de Portago, is in a relationship with a photographer, Linda Christian. When he’s first selected to drive for Ferrari, he celebrates by running and leaping into Linda’s bed, naked. The two engage in obvious foreplay and perhaps lovemaking, but we don’t actually see anything more critical than de Portago’s exposed rear and flanks.
Enzo spends the night with his mistress at the home he bought for her. (Indeed, it seems to be a fairly regular occurrence.) He kisses the woman tenderly as he gets up to leave. When he returns to his real home, Laura is furious. She reminds him that she doesn’t care about his “whoring,” but that he made a commitment to return before the maid came with their morning coffee.
That said, Laura may be more bothered by Enzo’s infidelity than she lets on. When Enzo wants to send money to the widow of a former driver, she accuses him of perhaps sleeping with both the widow and her mother. (Enzo may indeed be guilty of the latter, but it’s hard to say.)
But Enzo and Laura’s marriage has some spice in it yet. After the two argue about finances, they start kissing passionately, and Enzo pushes the dishes on the dining table to the floor to make space for them. Each fumbles with the other’s clothes, and we see them soon in the throes of passion. (It’s obvious what they’re doing, but again, we’re not exposed to explicit nudity.)
Mistress Lina expresses regret over her longtime affair with Enzo. If she had known then what she knows now of marriage and relationships, she says, “I would not have interfered in another woman’s marriage.” When Enzo poses for pictures with de Portago and Linda Christian in front of one of his cars, Enzo puts his arm around Linda’s hip and pulls her closer to him: It seems like an aggressive sexual pass at first—both to Linda and the moviegoer—but it seems he was primarily trying to keep Linda from blocking the Ferrari logo.
In a flashback, Enzo dances in his underwear with one of his wife’s dresses for his son Dino’s amusement.
Enzo tells his drivers that racing is “our deadly passion. Our terrible joy.” Ferrari does an effective job of conveying the joy—and showing its terrors.
De Portago receives his job because of a deadly accident. A Ferrari driver, trying to turn in a course record, crashes and is hurled from the car—his body flying perhaps 20 feet in the air. Horrified onlookers see the driver’s bloodied, broken body on the track.
If only that was the worst crash we witness. One that’s far worse takes place: The car blows a tire and goes airborne, smashing into the top of a telephone pole. The car tumbles into a stand of spectators, killing several and injuring several more. We see the corpses of some of the victims, bloodied and still. One stray foot and shin lie in the grass. One man has been sliced in half, and we see the innards from both halves spill out.
Elsewhere, we see other crashes of varying severity (though the rest do not involve fatalities).
We hear that several Ferrari drivers have been killed this year, and Enzo quotes a few critical stories written about his company’s tragic track record. One of those stories quotes the Pope as saying that Enzo was like “Saturn devouring his children” (referring to the jealous habits of the Roman titan of time). Another apparently wrote that Enzo was a “widow-maker.” Enzo admits that since he lost two friends to racing 24 years earlier, he doesn’t make friends with his drivers. And he accuses his current drivers of lacking commitment as one sits beside him, wearing a neck brace.
Enzo’s own dangers are found closer to home. When he arrives at home after a night with his mistress, Enzo discovers his wife is holding a gun. She fires it and sinks a bullet in the wall behind Enzo. It doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident, judging from the nonchalant reaction from the household maid. “No one was hurt, don’t make a fuss,” Laura tells her mother-in-law as she walks past her.
Later, when Enzo visits Dino in the family crypt, Enzo tells his dead son, “Your mother missed on purpose. One day she won’t, and I’ll be here with you.”
We learn that Dino died from muscular dystrophy at age 24.
Nine uses of the f-word and five of the s-word. We also hear multiple uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and the British profanity “bloody.”
When Enzo asks one of his drivers, Piero Taruffi, whether he likes a new racecar, the chain-smoking Taruffi gripes that it doesn’t have an ashtray. “If I put in an ashtray, will you drive it in the Mille Miglia?” Enzo asks, referencing a nearly 1,000-mile race across most of Italy.
Taruffi isn’t the only smoker on screen. Alfonso de Portago is rarely seen without a cigarette. Enzo and Laura smoke as well.
Enzo opens and pours out a bottle of wine for dinner, and Enzo and his drivers drink wine with meals.
Enzo and Ferrari may be having a difficult year in 1957, but Enzo believes in always staying on the offensive. When another sports mogul talks to him about his company’s racing slump, Enzo says that his team always bounces back, while the soccer team the other man owns never seems to. He jokes that Ferrari may need to relocate to another city so that his drivers aren’t dispirited by the soccer team’s “perpetual twilight of failure.”
Enzo strategically lies, schemes and keeps secrets.
When I was a kid, I had just one ambition in life: to own a Ferrari.
Thus far, I have fallen a bit short. My Honda Fit gets me to and from movie screenings just fine, but it comes with about a sixth of the horsepower of a Ferrari F8 Spider.
But the appreciation I have for the cars remains, and I’m hardly alone. While Ferrari sold just 13,221 vehicles in 2022, millions of kids—and adults—still dream of owning one. Or even just driving one. A Ferrari’s blend of beauty and power may be unmatched in a manmade creation; the metal seems to flow like velvet, the engine screams like a dozen electric guitars.
Ferrari, the movie, is harder to love so uncritically.
Certainly, the film is filled with plenty of beautiful cars, fast lap times and motorsports intrigue. Adam Driver embodies Enzo Ferrari with humanity and mystery; and Penélope Cruz is astounding as his wife, Laura.
But when the film moves away from the track, it drives straight into sex and infidelity. Cigarette smoke and blue language curl through the air. And when the story hits the road—well, the car-based carnage can be gruesome indeed, and Ferrari red isn’t the only crimson we see.
I’m assuming that plenty of kids still love their sports cars. And given Ferrari’s potential appeal to kids, this feels like a missed opportunity. You wouldn’t need to throttle this movie back too much to clock in with a PG-13.
But the film appeared to take Enzo’s exhortation to his drivers to heart: Brake later. Steal the line. Push the barriers and barrel toward the finish—no matter who it might hurt along the way.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
