Ferrari

 Why do we watch racing movies? The only possible answer to this question is that we yearn to see the driver crash in the most grotesque way conceivable (one we have not seen before). We want to see his suffering wife, his innocent children left fatherless and the brotherhood of the other drivers shown on the screen to rouse us from our mundane lives. Ferrari attempts to subvert our expectations as an audience by showing a crash so gruesome and so tragic that we are simply repulsed by it. This crash (the traditional western climax) is not climactic at all, despite aims to be so; it is detached from the main themes of the film. The pursuit of the sublime over all and sonhood constantly reinstate themselves as the driving (no pun intended) motifs of the plot. These motifs never result into anything substantive in the grand scheme of the narrative. Although Ferrari pushes ceaselessly in the pursuit of beauty he ultimately does not pay a personal price due to the crash. Although De Portago crashes, we are not even introduced to his mother. The loose ends proposed by Michael Mann seem to always be neatly tied up, leaving no room for pain. His choice of lighting was also uncanny for his usual cinematographic style of harsh light and its resulting shadows. Overall, the film felt as though a Hollywood executive put a gun to Mann's head and forced him to make a generic biopic about Ferrari.