Whoa boy, House of Gucci is a mess of a film – it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that it was nearly shut out at the Academy Awards, taking just a single nomination for Hair & Makeup (well earned), because just about nothing in this movie works at all. Other than wasting a solid performance from Lady Gaga, there is nothing remarkable about this movie at all. It’s long, and sort of nice to look at, but the story is boring, the humor often doesn’t land, and it moves like someone fired the director halfway through the shoot.
Based loosely on the actual story of the fall of the Gucci family empire, House of Gucci follows Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), an office manager in her father’s trucking firm who courts the hapless Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), heir of the majority shareholder of the Gucci fashion house. After they marry, she asserts herself and pushes Maurizio to be more aggressive at the company, leading him into conflict with his uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and cousin Paolo (Jared Leto, looking as handsome as ever). When Maurizio does take the reins, however, his marriage to Patrizia sours, leading her to hire a couple of hitmen to kill him.
The story itself is more than juicy enough for a great movie – and perhaps the book on which this is based is better than the film – but the script is a dud. There’s very little tension in the story, much of which hinges on arcane financial maneuvers, and there’s no real reason to believe that Maurizio and Patrizia would get together. It doesn’t help that there’s zero chemistry between Driver and Lady Gaga. But the script mostly wastes some good material here: These are terrible people, most of whom aren’t very bright, and the film does nothing with all of this. It’s so rarely funny that it’s hard to understand why anyone made a movie about these people without at least trying to mine some humor from the situation – or playing it straight as a financial drama, like Margin Call.
Other than Lady Gaga, nobody is very good in this movie, and they’re just about all worse for the decision to make everyone use Italian accents – even though they’re actually speaking English. Driver’s accent is bad, and he’s really charmless throughout the movie. Pacino gets a WOO-AH! or two in, and his accent is passable. Jeremy Irons appears near the beginning of the movie as Maurizio’s emphysemic father, with an especially bad accent and makeup that makes him look dead several scenes before he’s actually dead.
And whoa boy is Jared Leto bad in this – not least for his ridiculous, that’s-a-spicy-meat-a-ball! accent, which I assume he ordered off the specials menu at Olive Garden. Is he supposed to be Mario or Luigi? I half-expected him to tell Maurizio he need-a the sheets for the table. Chef Boyardee is more authentically Italian than this pagliaccio. It’s the Little Caesar’s of accents. It’s Parmesan cheese, from Wisconsin. It’s commedia della farte. But he’s also just flat-out overacting, too, infusing the character with nothing useful at all. He turns Paolo into a two-dimensional joke, and not a funny one. He’s a moron, yes, but morons can be funny, or kind, or can elicit our empathy. Leto’s Paolo does none of these. He just sucks the air out of the scene every time he appears.
The best part? It’s over two and a half hours! One of the key plot points, where Patrizia decides to have her husband killed, is relegated to maybe ten or fifteen minutes at the very end of the film, and the aftermath just gets one small scene of Patrizia in the courtroom. It’s as if the screenwriters didn’t understand any of what made this story interesting. Lady Gaga probably deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in this mess – certainly over the impersonations that took up three of the five spots for Best Actress – but there’s no other reason to watch this. (If you still want to, though, you can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)
Maybe we can finally lay to rest the idea that Adam Driver is a leading man. What has he actually been good in? Same with Jared Leto as anything in entertainment.
Gaga is the only redeeming part of this movie.
Driver was very good in Paterson.
It’s commedia della farte
I’m dead. That whole paragraph about Leto is great
I didn’t know the story at all. At the end I Wikipedia’d the story and shared with my wife. We both said, “wow that story is better in Wikipedia!” That murder felt hackneyed and unclear. And apparently a lot of the happenings at the end was just made up. Tom Ford was never there at the same time as Maurie
The thing about “House of Gucci” that I couldn’t get past– besides the fact that it was a huge mess– was the decision to use the stereotypical Italian accents. If a filmmaker were to cast English-speaking actors to play Chinese characters or Mexican characters (i.e., Chinese nationals or Mexican nationals like the Italian nationals portrayed in “Gucci”), it would clearly be unacceptable and offensive to have those actors speak English using stereotypical Chinese or Mexican accents. Why was it O.K. to use stereotypical Italian accents? Obviously, they could have cast this film using Italian (i.e., from Italy) actors speaking Italian, and it was a choice to have the dialogue in English because the producers and director thought it would be more marketable that way in the U.S. But, if you’re going to do that– target the American market– then just have the actors speak with their normal accents. It would be less distracting (not to mention inoffensive) to have Jeremy Irons speaking with a British accent and Adam Driver with an American accent than it was to hear these cringeworthy accents (although, at the same time, it also felt like Leto and DeNiro seemed to be acting in a completely different and possibly much more entertaining movie than anyone else in the cast).
This is the second Ridley Scott film where he’s made a similar choice that really distracted from the movie. In “Gladiator,” he had all of his actors– some of whom were British and some of whom were not (e.g., Joaquin Phoenix)– speak in British accents. In 2nd-century Rome. Made no sense.
I found the choice to cast zero Italian actors in the major roles especially bizarre. Irons’ role could easily have been filled by, say, Giancarlo Giannini, who has appeared in a number of English-language movies.
I completely agree with all this and in fact I walked out before the movie ended. It was just tedious.