Ferrari

Venice Film Festival #4 – PalaBiennale

Wow, what an utter disappointment. Ferrari feels like such a forgettable movie. It’s void of any real substance for the majority of its runtime and doesn’t really function properly as either a biopic or a more story focused film. The film isn’t slow, but for the first two thirds I was bored out of my mind. You are dropped into Ferrari’s life when he is about to compete in a race, and you are also following his marriage falling apart. The setup to the race is just lacking depth, Ferrari isn’t really given any personality bar stress, but even this is a push, and not a single other supporting character is given anything of note.

The better part of the movie is dealing with his marriage, not really because it’s actually far and away more gripping, it’s really just cause of Penelope Cruz. She’s got some good scenes, I mean it’s Penelope Cruz she doesn’t give a bad performance, and she’s doing a lot of big scenes which helps. While her performance is good, she still isn’t given much. It’s a major problem with this film that no one is given any real character development. Ferrari is given some, but not enough to have this be a biopic, we don’t really learn and understand Ferrari bar the plot about his son.

When the race happens in the last third, it gets a bit more entertaining, however if you’re going to film a race you need to have good spatial awareness to build tension and this film had none so the race after a while became just noise. In this act it becomes more apparent that the tone of the movie is just all over the place. For the entire film the tone was just jarring, bouncing between dramatic and weirdly comedic, but I don’t think this was intentional. There’s a scene near the start where an accident happens, we cut into slow mo, and it’s a big dramatic moment, and this is immediately cut short by Adam Driver delivering some of the cheesiest dialogue.

Speaking of Driver, he’s fine, I guess. It’s very House of Gucci, but I didn’t mind his accent because he was outshined by Shailene Woodley who has one of the worst Italian accents. Really none of the performances are that notable it’s just a massive let down. Possibly some of the worst editing I’ve ever seen as well, which helped make the film such a tonal mess. However, I loved the colouring, it was so stunning