Giving Ridley Scott the keys to the Gucci story – a wild tale of family, betrayal and murder – should have made for one of the most arresting crime capers of the veteran director’s career. After all this is the man who gave us Gladiator, American Gangster and just this year The Last Duel. The result therefore is as baffling as it is frustrating; House of Gucci may just be Scott’s most bizarre film to date – a tonally jarring mishmash of humour and intense drama that does neither particularly successfully thanks to some truly horrendous performances and a painfully slow pace that somehow manages to also feel as if it is rushing through its dense narrative.
When working class Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) runs into heir to the Gucci fashion fortune Maurizio (Adam Driver), she senses that her fortunes are about to change, latching onto the man who is intent on becoming a lawyer and leaving his family’s business behind. When Maurizio introduces his new girlfriend to his hotheaded father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), he senses Patrizia’s less than honourable intentions, cutting his son off from the fortune and ceasing all contact as Maurizio assumes a less glamorous, but fulfilling life with his new bride.
But when Maurizio’s boisterous uncle Aldo (a fantastic Al Pacino) learns of his brother and nephew’s estrangement he makes it his mission to bring Maurizio and Patrizia back into the fold, offering him a lucrative job at Gucci and indoctrinating Patrizia into a life of luxury she could only have dreamt of. As Patrizia’s manipulation of Maurizio into taking the reigns of Gucci becomes more and more damaging to the rest of the family, including Aldo’s dimwitted son Paolo (Jared Leto), she is forced to consider desperate measures to stop the monster she helped create.
What immediately stands out about House of Gucci is the Italian accents. Everyone in the film attempts them, largely to godawful results outside of Al Pacino, and it is the first sign that something is not quite right. By and large it doesn’t stop the genuinely good performances of Adam Driver or Jeremy Irons from shining through but in Jared Leto’s case it turns what seems to be Scott making a serious attempt at telling this story in dramatic fashion into a farcical mess. Swathed in prosthetics and make-up, Leto completely loses himself in the character of Paolo. Unfortunately that character plays as more of a Mario Brother than a convincing human being, with Leto’s offensively stereotypical Italian accent taking the character to levels of parody the rest of the film is not prepared to follow. Every time his dimwitted, fat-suit laden character appears on-screen you can guarantee that the scene will devolve into unintentional hilarity, often at the expense of genuinely compelling dialogue or a pivotal beat, forgotten in the wake of Leto’s ridiculousness.
The film’s overall forgetfulness is also compounded by the strange pacing decisions Scott makes in his telling of Maurizio and Patrizia’s story. The introduction to these characters feels incredibly rushed, with them meeting and together within the opening fifteen minutes. We never get a reasonable amount of time to establish the characters or reason why we should care about them other than their functions within the story; Gaga as the manipulative temptress seeking status and Driver the unwitting cog in her plan, forced to betray his family for power and getting swept up in the allure of that power himself.
Once this dynamic is established Scott meanders through the inner workings of Patrizia’s long con, which mostly involves displays of exorbitant wealth and the obvious journey through Gucci’s fashionable history. Sure we get the impression that these characters are slowly transforming through their experiences, but once again Scott rushes the sudden switch Driver undergoes into monstrous business owner and Gaga’s sudden departure from that world, culminating in a finale that should be a lot more impactful than it is, with Scott keeping the audience at an arms length from his characters at all times; never allowing us to form any meaningful connection to them.
Much has been made of Gaga’s performance but she only narrowly escapes the same issues as Leto, her accent constantly wavering between an exaggerated Italian and Russian as she hams it up every chance she gets. Whenever a scene skews particularly dramatic or “awards-worthy” Gaga goes berserk, rarely giving anyone else in the scene a chance to go back and forth as she commands the room, regardless of the context of the conversation. It’s a distracting method of acting that undermines these important scenes, where Gaga could have benefitted from a “less is more” approach she almost always pivots the other way, regardless of how that affects the scene. For someone who schemed and plotted from the shadows as Patrizia Reggiano did, there never seems to be much quiet intensity in Gaga’s performance, replaced by a need to shine and exaggerate even the most imperceptible traits.
House of Gucci is a strange anomaly in Ridley Scott’s filmography; a concept that on paper looks suited to his particular talent for complex, intense storytelling but which in practicality devolves into a messy, haphazardly paced jumble of poor accents and jarring tonal shifts. It almost feels like Scott on autopilot; a perfunctory telling of a story that could have been a gripping, steadily intensifying examination of a family on the way to a breakdown. Instead we’re left with a film that will at best gain a cult following for Jared Leto’s hilariously bad performance and at worst fade from collective consciousness.
House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, Jack Huston & Salma Hayek – In cinemas now.