The 2023 movie Denis Villeneuve calls a “masterwork”
Trying to settle on the best films released in any given year is an open-ended argument that can’t be definitively resolved, but what can’t be denied is nowhere near enough people saw a movie that left Denis Villeneuve glued to his seat.
Michael Mann returned from the longest sabbatical of a directorial career that began all the way back in 1981 with Ferrari, a long-gestating passion project that marked his first feature since 2015’s Blackhat. For a long time, the filmmaker was associated with propulsive thrillers that displayed his mastery of staging and pacing, making a biographical drama a change of pace.
It was something he always wanted to make, though, with Mann harbouring ideas of turning Enzo Ferrari’s life story into a feature since the turn of the millennium. After failing to secure the necessary budget required to execute his vision, he played the waiting game until the pieces fell into place.
Christian Bale was originally set to play the title role, but departed the project in 2016. His The Prestige co-star Hugh Jackman was set to be drafted in as his replacement, with Noomi Rapace eying the part of Laura Ferrari, but that didn’t come to fruition either. During that time, the film bounced from Paramount to STX Entertainment, with Adam Driver getting into the driver’s seat in February 2022.
At long last, Mann was able to realise his dream of making Ferrari a reality, albeit having agreed to defer part of his salary in order to mitigate the production budget of $100million. It was almost two decades in the making, but the end result turned out to be a rather substantial box office bust.
Despite a reliably formidable performance from Driver in the lead, Ferrari failed even to recoup 40% of its budget from cinemas and didn’t make so much of a ripple when it came to awards season. It’s a million miles away from being a bad film, but that doesn’t necessarily make it one of Mann’s finest, either.
That being said, Villeneuve would disagree after describing the film as “a masterwork” while discussing the film with its director, with the Dune director making a point of saluting Driver’s performance as one of the best of a career that never yields anything less than stellar work.
Naturally, being spoken of so highly by one of the most notable directorial talents in Hollywood has become a key part of Ferrari‘s marketing, with “Denis Villeneuve agrees that Michael Mann’s Ferrari is ‘a masterwork'” taking pride of place on the advertisements trying to convince audiences that it’s worth taking for a spin. Mann would have hoped for a better performance, but at the end of the day, he got to bring his passion project to life.
