Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (2022)

Bobby Moresco's Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend arrives with the solemnity of a museum plaque and the pacing of a shareholder meeting. Frank Grillo plays Ferruccio Lamborghini from his postwar return to Cento through the tractor years, the death of his first wife, the founding of Automobili Lamborghini in 1963, and the inevitable duel with Enzo Ferrari. The film treats each chapter as a diorama. A barn becomes a factory. A factory becomes a legend. Somewhere in between, a man argues with his son and loses a race he did not need to run.

For the purposes of cultural classification, this is a remarkably quiet specimen. The cast is European and white by the demands of the subject. Women appear as wives, widows, and romantic interests, and the film asks nothing of them beyond patience. Race, sexuality, climate, and the body are simply not on the agenda. The wealth on display is never interrogated. It is admired, polished, and parked in a driveway. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no finger wagged at the audience. The film's only ideology is the internal combustion engine.

None of this makes the film good. Critics were unkind, the Razzie voters were unkinder, and the whole enterprise carries the air of a corporate tribute commissioned to move product. Yet as a document of 2022, it is nearly an artifact: a biopic so uninterested in the cultural conversations of its own moment that it could have been shot in 1995 with a different cast and the same script. We classify it accordingly. A flat ledger, not as an insult, but as a fact. The man built fast cars. The movie built nothing at all.