Adam Driver was right to curse at that rude writer

If you were online a month ago, and you’re lying if you say you weren’t, you remember the clip: Actor Adam Driver is sitting up on a stage at the 2023 Camerimage International Film Festival in Torún, Poland. He’s unscrewing the cap off of his water bottle while taking questions from the audience about “Ferrari,” a film in which he plays the legendary automaker.

An unknown audience members decides to be a hero and asks Driver a question that doubles as an insult. Here’s the clip:

“What do you think about the crash scenes?” asks this interloper. “They looked pretty harsh, drastic, and I must say, cheesy for me. What do you think?”

To which Driver responds, “F—k you, I don’t know. Next question.” He leaves it there. Everyone laughs at the dickhead question guy, the clip goes viral, and we all live happily ever after.

The catch is that the above video was taken a month and a half ago, well before “Ferrari” was due in theaters (it drops here in America on Christmas Day). So none of us who were laughing at the mean Polish man actually knew if he was accurate in deriding the film’s racing scenes.

Lucky for you, I have now seen “Ferrari,” and I can rebut his criticism in full. So are you ready for another round of dunking on some poor anonymous schmuck? Well then … [Super Mario voice] Let’s-a go!

First of all, let me explain what “Ferrari” is about, just in case the title of the movie was too vague for you. “Ferrari” is the latest opus from dad movie legend Michael Mann, who’s been circling the project since the turn of the century. Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, former race car driver turned luxury sports car visionary. Ferrari has a wife, Laura (played brilliantly by Penelope Cruz). However, in accordance with Italian custom, also keeps a mistress (played by Shailene Woodley, who tries out an Italian accent for a while and then just kinda gives up). She has borne him a child, Piero.

Laura Ferrari, despite being Italian, doesn’t know that her husband is cheating on her, much less that he has an entire secret family. This revelation could destroy her, because she and Enzo open the film grieving the loss of THEIR only child. Complicating matters further, Laura holds a big stake in Enzo’s car company, which needs to win the fabled Mille Miglia to boost its image and sell enough cars to keep from defaulting. So Enzo’s professional future is tied, inextricably, to the personal mess he’s made for himself.

“Ferrari” is not Michael Mann’s best movie. Like “Oppenheimer,” its plot feels needlessly byzantine at times, and I got the sense that I would have understood the movie better if I’d read the book that it was based on. More relevant here, the opening scene of “Ferrari” features Driver inserted into old timey, black-and-white racing footage. The result looks like an opening skit for the Oscars and is indeed, as the man who verbally accosted Driver noted, cheesy. I feared that I might be in for two hours of the same kind of rich Italian family cosplay that made Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci” a laughingstock two years ago.

But Michael Mann is far too ambitious a filmmaker to let that happen. And if you love his movies, as I do, “Ferrari” gives you the requisite dose of Serious Men Doing Very Serious Things. On a technical level, it’s magnificent: the photography is crisp, the sound design is immaculate, and the Italian scenery on display is … [kisses own fingers] MWAH! Best of all, the characters feel genuinely Italian. They’re blunt. And not in that Italian American, “Heyo loogit the keister on dat one!” kind of way. I mean that they value truth over comfort, even if that truth is cruel. Nowhere is cruelty more pronounced than when Laura Ferrari finds out about Enzo’s bastard child, and takes her anger out on Enzo’s mother Adalgisa (Daniela Piperno).

“He is entitled to an heir,” the mother tells Laura.

After a solemn beat, Enzo’s mother replies, “As it turns out, one was not enough.”

There’s nothing cheesy about that scene. It is harsh and drastic, but in all the right ways. It hurts, badly.

Which brings us to the racing scenes. As with nearly every other Mann film, “Ferrari” is about intensely driven men who believe that their work is worth the cost, no matter the cost. Driver states that plainly in his money speech, in which he tells his drivers that they lack commitment. “Look at the Maserati team,” he tells them. “… Men with a brutal determination to win. With cruel emptiness in their stomachs. Detachment. Loyal to one thing: not the team, loyal to their lust to win.” 

Ferrari is telling his men that they must win and that, in order to do so, they must be willing to die out on the pavement. That is the “terrible joy” that lives within him, and it must also live in them.

I think you can surmise what happens next, but that doesn’t make it any less visceral. Ferrari sends his men out for the Mille Miglia. Not all of them finish the race, and this is where the racing scenes in “Ferrari” not only elevate this film, but auto racing as a whole. Mann puts you in the cockpit, and you can feel the dread. You know that something harsh and drastic can happen at any moment … and then it does.

When it does, Mann’s camera does not flinch. Nothing is soft-pedaled here, because that would be cheesy. You see the wreckage. You see bystanders wiped out in an instant. You see severed limbs blown onto the road. You see the cost of Ferrari’s ambition, and the film leaves you with the sickening realization that he was more than happy to pay it. That’s good filmmaking, and that’s why Adam Driver was right to tell that dude to go f—k himself. Enzo Ferrari would have been proud.