How in the World Did Ferrari End Up Using a Line From Walk Hard?

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Sometimes, other critics interrupt. Read the first entry here.

Let me interrupt, please, to address Bilge’s No. 3 movie of the year, Michael Mann’s Ferrari.

For anyone who is interested in biopics as a form, Hollywood history consists of two eras: BDC and ADC, or Before Dewey Cox and After Dewey Cox. In the days before the 2007 release of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, you could get away with a lot of clichés in a biopic, and mostly viewers like me would shake our heads and say, “That seems sorta familiar, but I guess you have to do all that in this kind of movie.” I guess you have to include the ominous scene where the star gets introduced to drugs. I guess you gotta have the part where his first wife says he’s never gonna make it in this business. I guess there’s no getting around the fact that, at some point, the biopic subject is going to break some furniture or whatever to symbolize how his life has hit rock bottom.

But that was BDC. When Walk Hard, directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Kasdan and Judd Apatow, came along and satirized every single one of those biopic tropes, plus a hundred others, it rendered the traditional tools of the biopic director absolutely, positively useless. Now, in the ADC era, if your biopic starts with a scene of your hero, near the end of his days, thinking about his entire life before he takes the stage? I am gonna roll my eyes. If a new, historically famous character walks into a scene in your biopic, and someone immediately refers to him by his full name? I’m gonna scoff. If your biopic introduces the main character’s saintly brother, who in some way is superior to the movie’s soon-to-be hero? I am, I’m afraid, going to snort right there in my seat.

So I approached Michael Mann’s Ferrari, as I approach all biopics in the ADC years, with great caution. At first it seemed quite promising. Like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Selma, other biopics I have kind of admired, Mann’s portrait of Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the titular car company, does not attempt to tell his entire life, but just focuses on a single dramatic incident (in this case the Mille Miglia race of 1957). It doesn’t follow a rise-and-fall arc, though Enzo’s fortunes take as many twists and turns as a Tuscan highway. And, of course, it is not a musical biopic, so there is no scene of Enzo plugging in his guitar, playing one chord, and hearing the crowd go wild.

Yet even Ferrari could not escape echoes of Dewey Cox. Because Michael Mann insisted upon casting Adam Driver, in his late 30s at filming, as 59-year-old Enzo Ferrari, the movie does include some eye-catching old-agening, giving Driver a little paunch and silver hair. In the movie’s first 15 minutes, we meet tortured Enzo’s bitter wife (Penélope Cruz) and his saintly mistress (Shailene Woodley). We also meet his tiny, wizened mother, played by Daniela Piperno, whose narrow, glittering eyes and wicked tongue are reminiscent of an orc from The Lord of the Rings. It’s she who, at the movie’s 16-minute mark, delivers the line I thought I would never hear in a major motion picture—not in the ADC era. She tells the family’s consigliere about the death of Enzo’s brother, Alfredo Jr., during the Great War. Then she sets her face in stone, glares off into the middle distance, and intones: “The wrong son died.”

Friends, I embarrassed myself in that movie theater, barking with laughter. “The wrong kid died” is, of course, a leitmotif of Walk Hard, heard over and over after Dewey’s brother Nate suffers a terrible childhood case of being cut in half by a machete. Dewey’s unforgiving father, Pa Cox, says it at least six different times in the movie, in situations both relevant (bitterly, after Nate’s death) and unusual (singing, while hauling sacks of flour in a barn). He even shows up in Dewey’s hallucinations while the rock ’n’ roll star is quitting drugs cold turkey. “Dewey, I don’t know if you can hear me in there,” says spectral Pa Cox to a sweating, panicking Dewey, “but the wrong kid died.”

How on earth did this line end up, nearly verbatim, in a prestige biopic by one of the most respected directors in Hollywood, 16 years later?! I can certainly believe that Michael Mann, a great filmmaker whose movies are not particularly funny, has never seen Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. But, truly, no one on the set of Ferrari had ever seen it? Or, if they had, none of them felt brave enough, on that particular day, to gently take Mann aside and suggest that they might find another way for Adalgisa Ferrari to express her displeasure with her son?

Well, I mused, maybe the problem is that the screenwriter had never seen Walk Hard. Unfortunately, I can’t ask the credited screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, who died in 2009 and presumably wrote the script when Mann first pursued the picture around the turn of the millennium—maybe even before Walk Hard came out. Indeed, some more digging suggests that the line itself predates the production of Walk Hard by decades. Ferrari is, officially, adapted from the auto journalist Brock Yates’ biography of Enzo, first published in 1991. (Though Yates did write the screenplay for Cannonball Run, he did not write this one.) And if you turn to Chapter 15 of the book, there’s “stubby, inflexible” Adalgisa, who during moments of rage “was heard to shout, ‘The wrong son died young!’ ” (Yates seems uncertain whether she really meant it: “Whether or not this was a brand of mordant octogenarian humor is unfathomable.”)

Astonishingly, it seems this line in Ferrari is based on documented fact. Does that mean it should be in the movie? Of course not. Time and circumstance have turned it from an incisive character note to a total howler. It’s been 16 years since Walk Hard, and in those years Martin’s screenplay has passed through the hands of innumerable studio execs, assistants, lackeys—not to mention such previously attached stars as Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. That no one, in all those years, stepped up—that after decades of development, the movie still arrived in theaters bearing this line of dialogue—suggests that Hollywood has still not heeded the lessons of Dewey Cox. “Will We Ever Learn From Walk Hard?” a recent headline in Paste plaintively asked, and the cliché-ridden scripts—and box-office success—of Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, and many more suggest that no, they won’t. Now we’ve even had Walk Hard’s spiritual successor, last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and it still hasn’t stopped.

Ferrari avoids many of the Walk Hard pitfalls. It even offers many pleasures: Penélope Cruz overacting with all her might, cool cars on winding Italian roads, a guy cut in half even more disgustingly than Nate Cox. But after that line, I simply could not take Ferrari seriously.
For no matter its impeccable production design, brilliant direction, or whipcrack editing, it is infected with the fatally silly virus that infects basically all biopics: the self-seriousness inherent in creating a portrait of a Great Man (or, very occasionally, a Great Woman), who brushes aside all else in pursuit of that very Greatness. The wigs, the clichés, the golden-hour light of Italy 1957: It’s all in service of a fundamentally foolish goal, one that not even a director as good as Michael Mann can achieve without making me giggle. It’s that goal, not only the specific music-biopic tropes, that Walk Hard is satirizing. And Mann’s Ferrari, serious as a Mass, steers right into the wall.

Neither Michael Mann (“traveling internationally”), Judd Apatow (“away for the holidays”), nor Jake Kasdan (no response to multiple emails) had any comment about the appearance of this indelible line in this most unexpected of places. I thought, once upon a time, that Walk Hard would change the way Hollywood made biopics, just as it had changed how I watched them. Instead, it seems, biopics just inch closer and closer to Walk Hard every year. In 2023, the biggest, splashiest biopic of the holiday season even quoted it.

Read the next entry in Movie Club: The Best Movie About Faith This Year Was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.