{"id":9499,"date":"2022-06-30T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9499"},"modified":"2022-06-30T12:19:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T16:19:24","slug":"house-of-gucci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/30\/house-of-gucci\/","title":{"rendered":"House of Gucci."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Whoa boy, House of<\/em> Gucci <\/em>is a mess of a film \u2013 it shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s long, and sort of nice to look at, but the story is boring, the humor often doesn\u2019t land, and it moves like someone fired the director halfway through the shoot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based loosely on the actual story of the fall of the Gucci family empire, House of Gucci<\/em> follows Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), an office manager in her father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story itself is more than juicy enough for a great movie \u2013 and perhaps the book on which this is based is better than the film \u2013 but the script is a dud. There\u2019s very little tension in the story, much of which hinges on arcane financial maneuvers, and there\u2019s no real reason to believe that Maurizio and Patrizia would get together. It doesn\u2019t help that there\u2019s zero chemistry between Driver and Lady Gaga. But the script mostly wastes some good material here: These are terrible people, most of whom aren\u2019t very bright, and the film does nothing<\/em> with all of this. It\u2019s so rarely funny that it\u2019s hard to understand why anyone made a movie about these people without at least trying to mine some humor from the situation \u2013 or playing it straight as a financial drama, like Margin Call<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other than Lady Gaga, nobody is very good in this movie, and they\u2019re just about all worse for the decision to make everyone use Italian accents \u2013 even though they\u2019re actually speaking English. Driver\u2019s accent is bad, and he\u2019s 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\u2019s emphysemic father, with an especially bad accent and makeup that makes him look dead several scenes before he\u2019s actually dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And whoa boy is Jared Leto bad in this \u2013 not least for his ridiculous, that\u2019s-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<\/em>. It\u2019s the Little Caesar\u2019s of accents. It\u2019s Parmesan cheese, from Wisconsin. It\u2019s commedia della farte. But he\u2019s 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\u2019s a moron, yes, but morons can be funny, or kind, or can elicit our empathy. Leto\u2019s Paolo does none of these. He just sucks the air out of the scene every time he appears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The best part? It\u2019s 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\u2019s as if the screenwriters didn\u2019t understand any of what made this story interesting. Lady Gaga probably deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in this mess \u2013 certainly over the impersonations that took up three of the five spots for Best Actress \u2013 but there\u2019s no other reason to watch this. (If you still want to, though, you can rent it on amazon<\/a> or iTunes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whoa boy, House of Gucci is a mess of a film \u2013 it shouldn\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1261,102,215],"class_list":["post-9499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2021-movies","tag-disappointments","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9501,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9499\/revisions\/9501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}