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„House Gucci' has a pervasive, insidious appeal. It may be a drama about a wacky, rich, European-chic Old World fashion dynasty, with a cast dominated by American actors who are scheming and emotional with garish Italian accents, but that doesn't mean it's a opera play of the high camp. Apparently, based on the trailer, a lot of people thought it would be just that, but trailers can be deceiving. There are moments in House of Gucci that make your jaw drop (which is, of course, one of the best things that can happen in cinema) and moments that make you laugh at the sheer boldness of who you are will see, but just because the characters in a drama behave overly shamelessly doesn't mean the movie watching them is over the top. House of Gucci is an ice pick docudrama that has a lot of fun with its large roster of ambitious villains, but it's never less than a straight forward and nimbly accomplished film.
Directed byRidley Scott, easily his best work since Gladiator, the film is compelling because it takes the world it shows us in its own cold, extravagant terms. "House of Gucci" is modeled on "The Godfather" pretty directly, and once you say that, it can sound like you're making a ridiculous, inappropriate claim for it. I'm not saying it's in that league as a film. (What is?) But the greatness of "The Godfather" was in part how he navigated the hidden depths of the Force, and sort of Fashionista Godfather Lite, "House of Gucci" is a sophisticated true-life story about how power actually works: in a business empire, in a family, among people who are supposed to look out for each other. This may be the stuff of a soap opera (and The Godfather as a novel had connections to Harold Robbins' meaty pot boilers), but when it's done, this good soap opera becomes heady human drama.
It's 1978 and Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a middle-class socialite who works for her father's trucking company in Milan, struts across the parking lot with ass-twitching enthusiasm while the truck crew members whistle at her. Patrizia knows what the film presents in a very Italian way, what she has and how to deal with it. At a disco party in a nobleman's mansion, she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam driver), a cute and rather lanky guy with oversized glasses, and against the pounding of Donna Summer, she cheers up when she hears his name. He's a law student, the scion of the Gucci fashion empire (but completely uninterested in the family business at this point), and the way she's following him, he's stalking him into a library to create a "casual" meeting (which it never occurs to you, it's coincidence), we could guess that she is an old gold digger.
Maybe so, but Lady Gaga fills her with a sad sincerity. Gaga's face is eager and open, with passion flashing through her eyes; She has the gift of a born actress, letting you read her emotions while keeping a nugget of mystery at bay. When Gaga plays Patrizia, she acts out how it's possible to target someone richAndfall in love with him. Their courtship has a lusty, pleading affection.
Then Maurizio introduces Patrizia to his father, the elegant and formidable Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), once a minor film actor, now a vampiric tycoon with Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" hanging on the wall of his salon. He is the lordly co-owner and patriarch of the Gucci brand; He can't imagine his only son marrying someone so inferior to him. However, Maurizio wins the admiration of the audience for standing by his romantic beliefs. He marries Patrizia (to the tune of George Michael's "Faith"), despite his father excluding him from the family fortune.
Scott, working from a cleverly layered screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (based on Sara Gay Forden's 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed), leads with a flat tone Directed by Puckische Gravitas. Along with Italian pop songs and operatic snippets, he stages each scene in an impeccable, neoclassical frontal manner that lacks ironic detachment while still making room for the breathtaking comedy of scandalous behavior.
As Patrizia and Maurizio, with their almost rhyming names, settle into their humble lives and give birth to a daughter, the film introduces the other members of the Gucci clan. There's Aldo, Rodolfo's brother and co-owner of the company; he is played byAl Pacinowith a scintillating squawk and shrug of real-world materialism that makes him instantly likable. Aldo and Rodolfo have a relaxing relationship. Both make a living from the company that made their family wealthy (and was founded by their father in Tuscany, where they still raise the cows that produce the magical Gucci leather), but Rodolfo is the artistic purist lost in of the past where Aldo is always looking for ways to commercialize and maybe vulgarize the brand, like opening a Gucci outlet in a Japanese mall at the foot of Mount Fuji.
Then there's Aldo's son Paolo, a frustrated designer who dons things like lavender corduroy suits. He thinks he has talent and doesn't have it, andJared Leto, bald with a long fringe of hair, unrecognizable except for his flashing eyes, not so much his lines asTo singshe, gives a delicious performance as this opera buffa wimp – the Fredo of the clan, theatrically beaten down in his loser's seriousness, with his insanely idiotic disco moves, a flyweight Gucci who still has the Gucci ego underneath it all.
When Patrizia gets in touch with Aldo at Aldo's 70th birthday party, she immediately sees that her "dearest" uncle can be a way back into the Gucci family. She charms him and he gives her two Concorde tickets to New York. He invites Patrizia and Maurizio to join the brand and since it's Maurizio's birthright we think: why not? Is there something wrong with Patrizia wanting to share in this fortune? She enjoys the perks — the free shopping spree at the Gucci boutique in Manhattan, the company apartment. For a brief moment, Maurizio and Aldo seem like one big, happy, greedy family. But there are tensions, such as a row over the fake Gucci handbags you can buy on the street for $29.95. Patrizia believes they damage Gucci's image; Aldo reveals that the Gucci company oversees them because they are profitable. (They're the '80s precursors for name designers sticking cheap versions of their labels in Target.)
As Patrizia, who sips martinis, grows greedy and keen to assert control of the company, Lady Gaga narrows her features and lets a dark savagery burn through her. We think we're seeing the riotous Lady Macbeth chapter of the Gucci saga, and in a way we do too when Patrizia tweaks her husband's will. But the beauty of Gaga's performance is that she never takes our eyes off the innocent little climber inside the schemer. Patrizia doesn't know, but she's in over her hairsprayed head. She meets up with a TV psychic named Pina (played with winning ruse by Salma Hayek) who becomes her brave cheerleader and accomplice and figures out how to get Aldo out of the picture and she invents a really sneaky way, To seduce and abandon Paolo. There's a ruthlessness to all of this that makes the film feel like a counterpart to Succession. But here's the big trick of House of Gucci: the party is just getting started.
"House of Gucci" is like a "godfather" that plays long after Don Corleone (or someone like him) has left the building. The aesthetic of the Gucci fashion empire—the heavy buckles and boxy leather, the dresses like body-hugging armor—is caught in an older era; The family has no forward-thinking leader, no guiding moral center. But there is a Michael Corleone: dear sweet Maurizio, who starts out as such a nice guy and then gets sucked into his wife's machinations who baptize him in the ways of power. Adam Driver executes the shifts in Maurizio with a lithe coldness in a superb performance. Maurizio wakes up to find that he is upset about what Patrizia is doing to his family. she tears it up. But by doing exactly what he went through, she instills a new ruthlessness in him. And he's changing. He's going to be... a Gucci.
You may be wondering: Who do we identify with in "House of Gucci"? For a while it's Patrizia; then it's Maurizio. But this is a film where the driving force of our engagement is truly the shifting spectacle of power. That, I suspect, is why some feel the film is lacking enough. Those looking for overripe cheesy malice won't find it, and those looking for a hero to bond with won't quite find it either. But if you get on the film's wavelength, the pageant of dynastic corporate warfare is mesmerizing. This is a movie where Maurizio gets kicked out of the family and then rejoins them only to see his wife take over but she flies too close to the sun so she needs to be kicked out too, after which Maurizio thinks that It's King of the Hill, but then when he reinvents the company and hires unknown Texan designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) to bring it into the 21st century, the company is cut off from the bottomhim. And Patrizia doesn't go away quietly, by the way. It's a deadly chair game where the house of Gucci turns out to be a house of cards. But the more it implodes, the more you can't look away.
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November 23, 2021 at 06:00
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House of Gucci review: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver reign in Ridley Scott's captivating fashion tabloid Godfather - Variety
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