Michael Mann’s Beguiling “Ferrari”

“Ferrari” has been in the workshop for quite a while. The screenplay is by Troy Kennedy Martin, who died in 2009. It features the trusty components of a Mann movie: the smooth mechanics of professional labor, plus—or, more often, versus—the exhaust manifold of men’s emotional lives. “When a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye,” Enzo explains to Piero, retooling diagrams of an engine, and there are passages of “Ferrari” in which sheer velocity becomes a state of grace. The cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt, likes to mount a camera down low, next to the left wheel arch of a race car, or else behind the cockpit, staring ahead. How swiftly we come to share the driver’s hunger, wanting nothing on God’s Earth except to eat up the track.