‘House of Gucci’ Review: Murder, Italian-Style
Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino and Jared Leto serve up a heaping platter of prosciutto in Ridley Scott’s tale of family treachery.
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The kindest thing I can say about “House of Gucci” — and also the cruelest — is that it should have been an Italian movie. Set mostly in Milan, it spins out a sprawling, chaotic, borderline-operatic tale of family feuding, sexual jealousy and capitalist intrigue, with plenty of drinks, cigarettes and snacks (the carpaccio comes highly recommended). Also cars, shoes, hats, sport coats, handbags, dresses, lingerie — whatever you want!
But for all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing. The true story of how the Gucci family lost control of the company that still bears its name — and of how its scion, Maurizio Gucci, lost his life to a hit man’s bullets — could have inspired Bernardo Bertolucci to heights of decadent spectacle, Luchino Visconti to flights of dialectical extravagance or Lina Wertmuller to feats of perverse ideological analysis. The raw material plays as tragedy and farce at the same time.
The actual director, Ridley Scott, possesses ample style and impressive craft, but at least this time around seems to be lacking the necessary vision or inspiration. (His underrated “All the Money in the World” was a tougher, tarter treatment of similar material.) The script, by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (based on Sara Gay Forden’s book), has a repetitive, wheel-spinning quality. Most of the scenes consist of Guccis yelling at other Guccis — in Milan and New York, amid the Alps and near a lake, in hotels and conference rooms and villas and cafes. The shouting, in heavily accented English, lasts from the early ’70s to the mid-90s, and you can tell what year it is by scrutinizing the clothes and haircuts. For a while it seems like the music cues (David Bowie, Eurythmics) might also help, but at some point in the ’80s the playlist gets scrambled.
About those Guccis. You’ve heard of ham? Well, this is a family-size salumi platter. Adam Driver is relatively restrained as Maurizio, who as a law student meets Patrizia Reggiani at a party, where she charmingly mistakes him for a bartender. She comes from a less exalted family — her father owns a small trucking company — and she is played by Lady Gaga with the verve of an Anna Magnani avatar in a Super Mario video game.
This is fun for a while — the movie is more than two and a half hours long — and Gaga and Driver have an interesting chemistry. Maurizio is quiet and a little passive, but Patrizia nudges him toward a bolder idea of himself. He defies his aristocratic father, Rodolfo (an impeccable, sepulchral Jeremy Irons), who regards Patrizia as a social climber and a gold digger. He isn’t altogether wrong, but Maurizio marries her anyway, and finds brief happiness working for his in-laws, trading in his cut-to-measure suits for proletarian coveralls. He plays soccer and horses around with the other drivers and mechanics during lunch break until Patrizia summons him to the office to attend to his conjugal duties. It’s pretty hot stuff.
But as the mood shifts from sex comedy toward loftier, more somber matters — money, loyalty, family honor — “House of Gucci” manages to become both overwrought and tedious. The older Gucci generation is divided between Rodolfo and his brother Aldo (Al Pacino), who runs the New York side of the business. Casting Pacino and Irons as siblings is a witty move: at this stage in their careers, both are highly mannered, sometimes almost self-parodic performers who exist at opposite ends of the thermal spectrum. If Irons were any chillier, he would crystallize. If Pacino ran any hotter, he’d burst into flame.
To complicate the kinship network, and to prevent a potentially dangerous outbreak of understatement, Aldo has a son, Paolo, who fancies himself a fashion genius and who is played by Jared Leto. You’ve heard of ham? Leto goes full mortadella, bulked up and stuffed into a pink corduroy suit, billowing tobacco smoke and throwing himself into paroxysms of agita. His most memorable line is “Boof-ah!”
There is potential here for camp, for glamour, for something louche and nasty and over-the-top. Did I mention that Salma Hayek plays a fortuneteller who becomes Patrizia’s sidekick and adviser? But all the emoting is crammed into a curiously literal, procedural frame, as if someone had tried to make an opera libretto out of court transcripts.
Patrizia urges Maurizio to cultivate alliances with his uncle and cousin, and then schemes to push them out, but rather than being interestingly contradictory her motives just seem incoherent. As Maurizio’s marital ardor begins to cool and he forsakes her for a glacial blonde (Camille Cottin), Patrizia’s focus shifts from commerce to revenge.
By then, “House of Gucci” has lost the thread of its own story and collapsed into contempt for its characters, who are terrible businesspeople on top of everything else. A postscript appears onscreen to inform us that Gucci, no longer a dynastic family concern, is now a lucrative global luxury brand, a bit of non-news that arrives as a muted happy ending. It turns out that this isn’t really tragedy or farce, grand opera or opera buffa: it’s corporate promotion.
A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.”
‘House of Gucci’ review: Lady Gaga and her terrible movie are shallow
Let’s set the record straight. Does Lady Gaga’s accent in the new film “House of Gucci” sound remotely Italian?
Nyet!
As Patrizia Reggiani, the crazed woman who had her fashion mogul husband Maurizio Gucci killed in 1995, Mother Monster comes off as Russian as Boris and Natasha, Mikhail Gorbachev and a cold bowl of borscht.
She’s as authentic as the rest of Ridley Scott’s puffed-up, ponderous drama, whose quest for Oscar glory officially ends today. Arrivederci!
Mystifyingly, the front-page killing and ensuing court battle only take up the last 10 minutes of this sleep aid. The preceding two-and-a-half hours are a glacial yet completely uninformative history of the luxe brand framed as a “Succession”-like struggle for power among the Gucci family.
Well, that’s what Scott and screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna imagine it to be. Really it’s a hodgepodge of wacko performances and disparate tones that “Project Runway” guru Tim Gunn would call “a lot of look.”
Gaga plays Patrizia, a girl of modest means who meets rich Gucci heir Maurizio (Adam Driver, also Russian) at a party and begins dating him. They get married and she goes from wide-eyed and innocent to a savvy businesswoman with a thirst for power.
The movie starts around 1978 and ends in 1998, but vampiric Gaga and Driver never age or perceptibly change over two decades.
Jared Leto does his usual disguise act as Paolo Gucci, a balding and clownish cousin with big designer aspirations and little talent. When he approaches Gucci patriarch Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) with his crummy drawings, the older gent says, “You have ideas?”
Leto replies, “Does an elephant s–t in the jungle?” He might as well have said, “It’s-a me, Mario!” because his performance is a stereotypical joke.
Al Pacino is fine as Aldo Gucci, Paolo’s pop who opened the first New York store, only his material isn’t as juicy as Jimmy Hoffa in “The Irishman.”
And Salma Hayek gets spacey for Pina, the psychic who conspired with Patrizia to off her hubby. Her scenes could be funny, weird or disturbing. Instead, they’re monochrome.
The problems of “Gucci” are greater than the acting, though. The movie, which feels longer than “The Ten Commandments,” never clearly expresses why we should care a lick about the machinations of some quirky Italians and their expensive loafers.
On TV, Ryan Murphy did a splendid job of explaining Versace and Halston’s spots in the fashion firmament and why Liza Minnelli in a red dress mattered. Scott & Co., on the other hand, make arrogant assumptions while we sit on our phones and make other plans.
You can’t fault Gaga for taking the molto meaty part. There are similarities to Ally in “A Star Is Born,” the role that snagged her an Oscar nomination, in that they’re both shy young women who become hardened by wealth and fame.
But the “Bad Romance” singer focuses so much on tics and facial expressions and her Slavic accent that there’s no soul, genuineness or vulnerability to the character. It’s like watching the “Paparazzi” music video on a loop for three hours.
If only Scott’s vision were as visually dazzling as a Gaga video. “Gucci” is a pale, ugly film whose underwhelming glamour doesn’t match the grandeur of a European fashion house. It looks as pricey as a knock-off Gucci bag on Canal Street.
