“House of Gucci” (2021) is Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Sara Gay Forden’s book, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed. The film explains why no member of the Gucci family runs the business by placing the blame on social climbing outsider, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), who marries and corrupts Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) until he surpasses her in turning his back on his family for money and fame. (Side note: Kering, a French-based corporation owns Gucci. Kering’s CEO is Francois-Henri Pinault, who is the son of Kering’s founder’s son and Salma Hayek’s husband!)
With a two-hour thirty-eight-minute run time, “House of Gucci” is pure tabloid, guilty pleasure goodness. If you are a faithful devotee of Scott’s work, then you will be happy to see him emerge from the existential crisis of dread in the face of death to enthusiastic diving into the shallow end of the pool. This film is more dishy than his most recent popular period film, “All the Money in the World,” which was also set in Italy, but was more gritty in its glimpse of the Italian criminal underworld. I came to watch actors chew the scenery and rip off clumps of it with their bare hands and I got it.
For such a long movie, it is a bit sloppy that a viewer could leave “House of Gucci” with little to no understanding of the actual mechanics of the business and what white collar criminal act each family member committed. Scott oversimplified the disputes of a family that had been warring since at least 1969, long before Patrizia met Maurizio, and likely long before that when the patriarch decided to give shares to each of his sons after World War II though Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) was most involved in daily operations.
“House of Gucci” is fueled by people’s desires to get a fly on the wall view as a wealthy family collapses so they can briefly feel superior before they return home to their comparatively duller family members and left-over Thanksgiving dinner. Scott’s film teaches several lessons to audience. Family comes before love and business. Scott uses Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) as the family wise man in the way that he dismisses Patrizia and Paolo (Jared Leto) then is later vindicated for his perspicacious view of the two, but my fellow audience members were sympathetic to both audibly expressing sympathy to Paolo’s reaction to constant rejection.
Scott also tries to advise people to maintain strict class and national segregation because mixing disturbs the environment and leads to chaos. The movie makes it a point that Maurizio may be a Gucci, but because he is half German, he is quiet and not to be trusted. Also the introduction of the Bahrain businessmen is a thinly disguised disdain of the other and outsider though near the denouement, when they critique their Gucci partner, I agreed with them. Or tell me that the director is British without telling me that the director is British.
Lady Gaga reassured audiences that she wanted the depiction of Italians to be authentic from Italians’ perspectives, not Italian American perspectives, but was it? I’m going to defer to actual Italians reviewing “House of Gucci,” It is hard to miss that this film is Scott’s second film set predominantly in Italy, and he treats them as caricatures. Leto and Pacino make over the top seem restrained compared to their exaggerated performances complete with raised voices, wide hand gestures and heavy accented English. Was it hilarious? Absolutely, but am I supposed to be watching a comedy and laughing at their tragedy? If the real Paolo and Aldo were sitting next to me in the theater, I would be uncomfortable, but their fictional counterparts are loveable though punished for treating Patrizia and Maurizio like family. “You may be an idiot, but you are my idiot,” Aldo reassures his son before their final scene together. They are sweet and warm though leading with their emotions make them vulnerable.
Lady Gaga is the real star of “House of Gucci” though as the movie unfolds, her character’s screen time decreases proportionate to Maurizio’s increased exposure. In a film that keeps afloat based on outrageousness, it is no surprise that as Driver must carry the movie, the film begins to drag. I don’t care how many shopping montages Driver is in or how high he goes after jumping off furniture, Driver just cannot beat Gaga who plays her character on many levels. Driver gets two: innocent or cool and distant. It is refreshing to see that Scott discovers a lightness usually missing in Driver’s performances and makes him visually palatable by echoing Irons’ straight-line sleekness and aristocratic hair swoop. These lines make it easier to direct the eye away from Driver’s face and accentuate his most attractive feature, his height. Scott deserves an award for finding ways to keep tiny Gaga and Driver eye to eye in each frame without Driver kneeling.
Gaga’s face projects Patrizia’s conniving calculations when she turns away from others then plays it straight when she turns around to face her target. Her character’s psychological arc goes from youthful, exuberant ambition, devoted beaming family woman drag as she pulls puppet strings, to confident, steely chess player to pinched anger uncoiling to lash out at her frustration for being stuck on the sidelines. Gaga’s scenes with Hayek, who plays Pina, her in house psychic, are hilarious with echoes of the witches in Macbeth. Pina is the only one who can attempt to reason with Patrizia, and Pina is no voice of reason, but a hype woman, who got more right than wrong though when she got it wrong…..ooh, boy. At least Scott passed the Bechdel test, but he does so by demonizing ambitious women, a comfortable trope. Even though it is a cautionary tale against Patrizia, it is possible for a viewer to embrace the villain as a revolt against power structures though she ultimately loses.
Because of Scott’s biases on class, gender and national origin, “House of Gucci” misses an opportunity for a more complex portrait of Maurizio, which is underdeveloped and emerges too late instead of a thread that can be traced from the beginning. For once, I am not going to blame Driver, who is quite endearing in his portrayal. Maurizio starts as an innocent then takes a sharp turn as a savvy mover and shaker who shakes off any past personal connections to find his own version of happiness. He gets a taste of freedom, independently discovers happiness then realizes that he has grown into a different person with different tastes, but we do not get the transition and realization. He goes from Patrizia’s clueless puppet to Scott’s classist heir, the man that he was born to be that Rodolfo tried to awaken in earlier scenes. While Scott knows more than I about what it is like to be a man, as an outsider looking in, men are not weak or strong or victims of women’s designs. They are human beings who choose to give their power and any blame for decisions that he made to the person who is most aligned with his interests then choose someone else once that person no longer reflects his desires. So in Scott’s film, the women get blamed as if they are brainwashers, and he is a helpless man boy, which is incongruous with the rest of his independent actions. He has a voice even if he chooses not to use it.
“House of Gucci” was fun, but could have used a couple of revisions. Gaga leads the pack and proves that musical performing artists are expert at transitioning to acting.
