With Oppenheimer and Napoleon, we’ve already had big-name directors delivering biopics of unforgivable geniuses. With Maestro and Ferrari, there are two more. Both are about towering figures of the 20th century, the sort of men who forced their nearest and dearest to orbit around them.
Both Ferrari (about Italian car maker and race team boss Enzo) and Maestro (about Leonard Bernstein, giant of American music) spend a fair amount of screen time on the women who could never escape their long shadows.
In Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver in the title role, that’s two women – Laura Ferrari, his wife and business partner, played by Penélope Cruz, and Lina Lardi, his mistress and mother of a son, played by Shailene Woodley.
The film is centred on 1957, when both his marriage and his factory’s finances are crumbling. The only way out, Enzo Ferrari is told, is to win more races so he can sell more cars. That means creating an all-star team to take on the 1957 Mille Miglia, a near-1600km sports car race on the open roads of Italy. Motorsport history will tell you this was the last such race and Mann’s movie shows you why in grim detail.
But there’s not much particularly exciting in the depiction of the race. There are some notable faces among Ferrari’s drivers, such as Jack O’Connell as Peter Collins and real-life motorsport enthusiast Patrick Dempsey as the victorious Piero Taruffi. But they have barely anything to do, other than sit in the cars before the stunt guys take over. If this curiously slow-paced film lacks for on-the-road excitement, then Mann’s emphasis on the behind-the-scenes business and domestic dramas might make up for it. Except the Driver-Cruz-Woodley triangle just doesn’t generate much spark. As he did playing another Italian brand-name in House of Gucci, Driver gets a nice suit, designer spectacles and an Italian accent that runs out of gas about halfway through. Woodley is just poor casting, and Cruz is the hot-tempered wronged woman but doesn’t have a chance to establish her character as anything but a nail in her husband’s tyre. Talking of casting, it seems no actual Italians were harmed in the making of this movie.
The movie takes Ferrari’s mechanical and design genius as read. He arrives as a guy who put the auto into autocrat, commanding a near-papal status among his countrymen in the post-war era. But how he got there isn’t of much interest to Mann, nor does his film get to grips with how a man who gave up racing himself after the death of his friends insists that his drivers win or die in the attempt.
Maestro has one thing in common with Ferrari – an impressive hooter on the face of its leading man. In the case of Bradley Cooper, who directs himself in the role of Bernstein, it’s a prosthetic that is initially distracting. But to complain about Lenny’s snozz would be missing the point in what is a dazzling, unconventional, risk-taking biopic that, by comparison, makes Cooper’s previous feature, A Star Is Born, look like a pop video.
The film is loosely framed around his long marriage to Felicia Montealegre, the Costa Rican actress (played impeccably by Carey Mulligan), with whom he had three children despite his many affairs with men and his alcohol and substance-abuse problems. Mulligan’s ever-forgiving Felicia does eventually run out of patience with him, delivering an ultimatum in a searing scene in their Manhattan apartment, given the surreal touch of Thanksgiving Parade balloons floating past the window.
Mostly, Maestro is a series of vignettes, some lateral-minded, some thundering with music, some unbearably sad; some briefly delivered in the form of a musical or visually evoking the period in which they are set; all smelling of Bernstein’s ever-present cigarettes.
Bernstein contained multitudes and Cooper does a terrific job of capturing them – his showmanship and brilliance on the podium comes in a long sequence where he conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral, England, in 1973. It’s the show-stopping centre to a great film, one that pips Oppenheimer for the greatest great-man biopic of the year.
Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann, is at cinemas from January 4. ★★★
Maestro is at cinemas and on Netflix from December 20. ★★★★★
