Never-a confuse shit for cioccolato. They may look-a the same, but they taste very different.
A movie as bad as House of Gucci shouldn't be as bad as House of Gucci. If you follow me. Basically, if you were to select the right moments - the ones in the film's shockingly weird trailers, for example - you would be 100% convinced that you had before you a remarkable piece of overpriced prestige-picture camp, a true-crime Oscarbait epic made by an A-list director with extremely talented actors that had somehow turned into a wall-to-wall festival of garish, tasteless excess. In these moments, the film is marked above all by those extremely talented actors deciding that it was play time, and they were going to all uncork some incandescent terrible Italian accents, the kind generally only spoken by fat plumbers whose daily life involves a lot of jumping on hostile turtles. And that is, for sure, in here: there is, even, arguably, a whole lot of it. One substantial character, Paolo Gucci, played by a go-for-broke Jared Leto and a hallucinatory quantity of grotesque latex, consists of absolutely nothing else.
And if this were all it was, we would have here a legendary trash masterpiece, the kind of gripping, vital film that respectable people aren't meant to make, which makes it all the more precious and exciting when they actually do. Instead, House of Gucci is a sodden bore, a tale of operatic melodrama and violent plotting in the world of Italian high fashion, with all of those "wossamatta you, you no like-a da pizza pie?" performances holding it up, that is somehow not even slightly interested in kitsch or camp. You can, apparently, force an A-list director to make an ass of himself, but you can't make him have a sense of humor about it.
That A-lister being Ridley Scott, who thanks to the pandemic-related delays to The Last Duel has found himself in the unusual position of having two pretty significant players in the same Oscar season. Though to be fair, if House of Gucci ends up pulling all that much awards attention, it will be primarily because it has the bullying feel of being a serious prestige picture, not because it's terribly good. The film is the true story of the dying days of Gucci, the iconic Italian fashion brand, as a family-owned business, before it got picked up and revitalised by an investment firm in the 1990s. It is also, more narrowly, the story of Patrizia Gucci née Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a woman of no particular means who marries Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) in 1978 and proceeds to entangle herself in the family's doings, which are already pretty fraught at the time: Maurizio's father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) has little patience for his son and none at all after he marries a gold-digging commoner, but Patrizia is able to charm Aldo (Al Pacino) Rodolfo's older brother, who very happily restores Maurizio to the family's good graces, given that his own son Paolo is a talentless idiot fuck.
That's compressed substantially from the true story: Aldo and Rodolfo had two other brothers and a sister, none of them so much as mentioned in passing, and the time frame has been tightened (Patrizia and Maurizio met in 1970 and married in 1972; on the back side of things, Maurizio had already been ousted from Gucci in 1993, before some of the events in the company's history that the movie positions him as being involved with). This is, presumably, mostly just to compress a very messy history in an only slightly messy film, with screenwriters Becky Johnston and Robert Bentivegna wrangling Sara Gay Forden's book down into a still very indulgent - disgustingly, punishingly indulgent, even - 158-minute running time. And even at that length, the film is still bursting, so much so that it's tough if not actively unpleasant to try and sort through it all. The film's internal chronology is an absolute wreck: months path in scenes that appear synopsise at most weeks, the only thing marking the passage of years is that Jeremy Irons has make-up added to make him look like his body is rotting away from cancer. The film gives Patrizia and Maurizio one daughter (they actually had two), and this feels like it might be a way to cheat into chronology: aha, we get to watch a child grow up! But this is only actually used for maybe three different scenes.
The lack of any clear chronological flow in House of Gucci is both a major problem in its own right, and also a symptom of the film's generally bad habit of never fully settling on a storytelling approach it cares to follow. On a scene-by-scene basis - or really, on a moment-by-moment basis - the film has some inspired, genuinely great scenes. The one that stands out the most to me as the work of a talented director comes when the cops arrive to shut down an illicit fashion show, and the opera singer who had been accompanying the models finds herself trailing off into a hollow a capella rendition of "Der Hölle Rache" as her orchestra is chased away, and she is lost in a terrible, empty wide shot. It's one of the bluntest demonstrations of the film's hollowing-out of the fancy, bloodthirsty world it depicts, and also just a striking combination of sound and image. It's also a scene that doesn't significantly involve any of the film's main characters except right at the very end, which speaks to how much House of Gucci doesn't really seem to care about its own narrative.
Indeed, for as busy as it is, and as many moving parts as it has, it's not at all clear what House of Gucci thinks it's doing. Step back far enough, and it appears that the idea here is for a grand epic dive into the warring egos of shitty rich people, with the destabilising presence of Patrizia throwing into relief what insularity and ossification have done to the Guccis. A bleak epic about the corruption of a dynasty, basically. And there are certainly elements of that which work, though Scott and company never manage to settle on a tone or a perspective on that material. There are many, many scenes of business meetings and legalese; there are many, many scenes of people snarling at each other. These many, many scenes very rarely feel like they belong in the same movie.
The obvious solution, inherent to how the film views Patrizia, is to cast this all as a grand opera. She's a complicated, ambiguous figure; we're meant to see her as both admirably calculating in her manipulation of the Guccis, as well as a terrifying monster willing to destroy and devour just for fun. And really ramping up the melodrama would be a way to combine those modes without too much trouble. Except that Scott seems unwilling to treat this as a melodrama. Instead, the dominant mode is very prim, polished Oscarbait of the most lifeless sort: handsomely shot by Dariusz Wolski with elegant sets by Arthur Max, like a series of museum dioramas set to an undoubtedly expensive litany of super-obvious '80s hits that make this feel sort of like the world's most boring jukebox musical (near the end, they switch things up with an even less-imaginative Puccini cue). And it just sucks the life out of everything.
But then, cutting against all of this in the most shocking, happily disorienting way, we get those big, burly, mamma mia!-scaled performances. And this is just profoundly inexplicable: how a film could be simultaneously so drab and unwatchable, while possessing such fearlessly tasteless acting. This is all, I think, mostly due to Leto, whose performance is miraculously dumb, looking like a bloated corpse with an awful combover and talking like a hate crime, and it is where all of the vitality in the film flows from. In what does not feel like even the smallest coincidence, all three of Pacino, Irons, and Gaga are so much better when they're sharing themes with him, in part because of the almost visible switch flicking on in their heads - Irons especially practically seems to have a cartoon lightbulb floating above him as he realises, watching Leto clown around like a moron, that huh, we can do this? Great!, and thereupon turning their big showdown into a deliciously purple bitchfest of campy insults. Gaga, whose accent wanders all over the Italian peninsula and into Eastern Europe, is at her very best when she's able to match her cartoon awfulness with his - the instantly legendary "Fadder, Son, and Howse of Goochi" ad-lib happens when she's opposite Leto, and there is absolutely no chance that was an accident. It's kind of tough watching her, honestly; you can tell that she's not entirely comfortable enough with herself as a film actor to Go For It as much as the film needs; undoubtedly let down by her director, who seems particularly unsure of what he wants from his cast here, she's very clearly restraining herself and trying to play things straight, and every time she figures out the goofiest way to read a line or even just shape her face into a pantomimic reaction shot (such as a terrific moment late in the film where she's staring at Maurizio under strobe lights, and her faces is contorted like a cobra studying its prey), House of Gucci suddenly flares up with all the garish excellence that might actually make it work as an out of control melodrama.
What does this then leave us with? Is the film merely bad? So bad it's good? Camp pretending to be Oscarbait, or Oscarbait pretending to be camp? The answer is a little bit in the eye of the beholder, but for myself, I didn't find House of Gucci to be nearly enough fun given how spectacularly bad its worst elements are. There simply isn't enough Leto to go around; he's a major supporting character in a film that cycles through its supporting characters pretty fast. And Gaga's greatest moments are too few and far between to compensate. And so, despite all the promise, we end up with just a pretty routinely boring and bad movie, one with some good flavoring to cover up its weak fundamentals. Maybe a shorter, more propulsive House of Gucci could make more of its intermittent strengths and really thrive as a melodrama. But the one we got is tiresome and devoid of inspiration, the kind of mediocrity that happens when filmmakers are too proficient at their job to go colorfully crazy.
And if this were all it was, we would have here a legendary trash masterpiece, the kind of gripping, vital film that respectable people aren't meant to make, which makes it all the more precious and exciting when they actually do. Instead, House of Gucci is a sodden bore, a tale of operatic melodrama and violent plotting in the world of Italian high fashion, with all of those "wossamatta you, you no like-a da pizza pie?" performances holding it up, that is somehow not even slightly interested in kitsch or camp. You can, apparently, force an A-list director to make an ass of himself, but you can't make him have a sense of humor about it.
That A-lister being Ridley Scott, who thanks to the pandemic-related delays to The Last Duel has found himself in the unusual position of having two pretty significant players in the same Oscar season. Though to be fair, if House of Gucci ends up pulling all that much awards attention, it will be primarily because it has the bullying feel of being a serious prestige picture, not because it's terribly good. The film is the true story of the dying days of Gucci, the iconic Italian fashion brand, as a family-owned business, before it got picked up and revitalised by an investment firm in the 1990s. It is also, more narrowly, the story of Patrizia Gucci née Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a woman of no particular means who marries Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) in 1978 and proceeds to entangle herself in the family's doings, which are already pretty fraught at the time: Maurizio's father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) has little patience for his son and none at all after he marries a gold-digging commoner, but Patrizia is able to charm Aldo (Al Pacino) Rodolfo's older brother, who very happily restores Maurizio to the family's good graces, given that his own son Paolo is a talentless idiot fuck.
That's compressed substantially from the true story: Aldo and Rodolfo had two other brothers and a sister, none of them so much as mentioned in passing, and the time frame has been tightened (Patrizia and Maurizio met in 1970 and married in 1972; on the back side of things, Maurizio had already been ousted from Gucci in 1993, before some of the events in the company's history that the movie positions him as being involved with). This is, presumably, mostly just to compress a very messy history in an only slightly messy film, with screenwriters Becky Johnston and Robert Bentivegna wrangling Sara Gay Forden's book down into a still very indulgent - disgustingly, punishingly indulgent, even - 158-minute running time. And even at that length, the film is still bursting, so much so that it's tough if not actively unpleasant to try and sort through it all. The film's internal chronology is an absolute wreck: months path in scenes that appear synopsise at most weeks, the only thing marking the passage of years is that Jeremy Irons has make-up added to make him look like his body is rotting away from cancer. The film gives Patrizia and Maurizio one daughter (they actually had two), and this feels like it might be a way to cheat into chronology: aha, we get to watch a child grow up! But this is only actually used for maybe three different scenes.
The lack of any clear chronological flow in House of Gucci is both a major problem in its own right, and also a symptom of the film's generally bad habit of never fully settling on a storytelling approach it cares to follow. On a scene-by-scene basis - or really, on a moment-by-moment basis - the film has some inspired, genuinely great scenes. The one that stands out the most to me as the work of a talented director comes when the cops arrive to shut down an illicit fashion show, and the opera singer who had been accompanying the models finds herself trailing off into a hollow a capella rendition of "Der Hölle Rache" as her orchestra is chased away, and she is lost in a terrible, empty wide shot. It's one of the bluntest demonstrations of the film's hollowing-out of the fancy, bloodthirsty world it depicts, and also just a striking combination of sound and image. It's also a scene that doesn't significantly involve any of the film's main characters except right at the very end, which speaks to how much House of Gucci doesn't really seem to care about its own narrative.
Indeed, for as busy as it is, and as many moving parts as it has, it's not at all clear what House of Gucci thinks it's doing. Step back far enough, and it appears that the idea here is for a grand epic dive into the warring egos of shitty rich people, with the destabilising presence of Patrizia throwing into relief what insularity and ossification have done to the Guccis. A bleak epic about the corruption of a dynasty, basically. And there are certainly elements of that which work, though Scott and company never manage to settle on a tone or a perspective on that material. There are many, many scenes of business meetings and legalese; there are many, many scenes of people snarling at each other. These many, many scenes very rarely feel like they belong in the same movie.
The obvious solution, inherent to how the film views Patrizia, is to cast this all as a grand opera. She's a complicated, ambiguous figure; we're meant to see her as both admirably calculating in her manipulation of the Guccis, as well as a terrifying monster willing to destroy and devour just for fun. And really ramping up the melodrama would be a way to combine those modes without too much trouble. Except that Scott seems unwilling to treat this as a melodrama. Instead, the dominant mode is very prim, polished Oscarbait of the most lifeless sort: handsomely shot by Dariusz Wolski with elegant sets by Arthur Max, like a series of museum dioramas set to an undoubtedly expensive litany of super-obvious '80s hits that make this feel sort of like the world's most boring jukebox musical (near the end, they switch things up with an even less-imaginative Puccini cue). And it just sucks the life out of everything.
But then, cutting against all of this in the most shocking, happily disorienting way, we get those big, burly, mamma mia!-scaled performances. And this is just profoundly inexplicable: how a film could be simultaneously so drab and unwatchable, while possessing such fearlessly tasteless acting. This is all, I think, mostly due to Leto, whose performance is miraculously dumb, looking like a bloated corpse with an awful combover and talking like a hate crime, and it is where all of the vitality in the film flows from. In what does not feel like even the smallest coincidence, all three of Pacino, Irons, and Gaga are so much better when they're sharing themes with him, in part because of the almost visible switch flicking on in their heads - Irons especially practically seems to have a cartoon lightbulb floating above him as he realises, watching Leto clown around like a moron, that huh, we can do this? Great!, and thereupon turning their big showdown into a deliciously purple bitchfest of campy insults. Gaga, whose accent wanders all over the Italian peninsula and into Eastern Europe, is at her very best when she's able to match her cartoon awfulness with his - the instantly legendary "Fadder, Son, and Howse of Goochi" ad-lib happens when she's opposite Leto, and there is absolutely no chance that was an accident. It's kind of tough watching her, honestly; you can tell that she's not entirely comfortable enough with herself as a film actor to Go For It as much as the film needs; undoubtedly let down by her director, who seems particularly unsure of what he wants from his cast here, she's very clearly restraining herself and trying to play things straight, and every time she figures out the goofiest way to read a line or even just shape her face into a pantomimic reaction shot (such as a terrific moment late in the film where she's staring at Maurizio under strobe lights, and her faces is contorted like a cobra studying its prey), House of Gucci suddenly flares up with all the garish excellence that might actually make it work as an out of control melodrama.
What does this then leave us with? Is the film merely bad? So bad it's good? Camp pretending to be Oscarbait, or Oscarbait pretending to be camp? The answer is a little bit in the eye of the beholder, but for myself, I didn't find House of Gucci to be nearly enough fun given how spectacularly bad its worst elements are. There simply isn't enough Leto to go around; he's a major supporting character in a film that cycles through its supporting characters pretty fast. And Gaga's greatest moments are too few and far between to compensate. And so, despite all the promise, we end up with just a pretty routinely boring and bad movie, one with some good flavoring to cover up its weak fundamentals. Maybe a shorter, more propulsive House of Gucci could make more of its intermittent strengths and really thrive as a melodrama. But the one we got is tiresome and devoid of inspiration, the kind of mediocrity that happens when filmmakers are too proficient at their job to go colorfully crazy.
Categories: joyless mediocrity, ridley scott, the dread biopic
