Sometimes you must hold your hands up and just give thanks for A-List stars strutting about in high fashion and hanging on for dear life to their Italian accents before they fly off and voice a Super Mario game. We should also take a moment to sip an espresso and take stock of one of the modern greats of cinema, Sir Ridley Scott, 84 years young, still cranking out glorious movies like House of Gucci in the same year he made The Last Duel. Scorsese might have given this film some added zip and pizzazz but Scott lavishes his beautiful shot compositions on an ugly tale.
Adapted from the book, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden, Scott has fashioned a gluttonous, bacchanalian feast of ham acting that needs to be savoured in one sitting. Don’t let the menu put you off as this meat is acorn-fed Iberico ham served up by some of the best in the business. Slice after slice is delivered by Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, the incomparable (and unfathomable) Jared Leto, in a refined manner by Adam Driver and Lady Gaga internalising her meat dress from a decade ago.
Gaga is sensational as Patrizia Reggiani from the moment she sashays across the screen, lapping up the attention of the truck drivers who work for her father’s haulage firm. She needs to be seen, needs to be powerful. Patrizia is restless and wants more, zeroing in on Adam Driver’s shy and awkward law student, Maurizio, heir to half of the Gucci fashion house. As soon as she hears his name she is transfixed, her ambition constricting around him like a Marmont leather belt.
Their chemistry on screen is undeniable, Gaga’s Patrizia is all gestures, whirling hands and stabbing cigarettes, a woman constantly in motion, a human defibrillator jolting Driver’s restrained Maurizio into action, to claim his place in the Gucci dynasty even though he is clearly happiest away from it. Driver subtlety injects his Maurizio with a throbbing ambition that gently pulses under his roll neck sweaters and behind the rims of his aviator glasses.
The more power Patrizia bestows on Maurizio, the more he resembles his decadent former movie star father, Rodolfo played by Jeremy Irons. Irons is the closest any actor has come to the venom and spite of Sir Laurence Olivier, his upper-class disdain for Patrizia and his masterful evisceration of his nephew, Paolo and his woeful attempts at fashion design are cruelty incarnate.
Paolo, the softly spoken idiot with a penchant for corduroy as created by Jarod Leto is worth the entrance fee alone. Stuffed into latex, a bald wig and an accent distilled from Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face and the Italian guy from the 1970s sitcom, the racial stereotype fest that was Mind Your Language, Leto’s Paolo is both crestfallen and absurd, a study in buffoonery and yearning. As ridiculous as the performance might be there is something pitifully touching about his sad clown act, but pathos might just be stretching credulity, “I will soar… like a pigeon” clips his Oscar wings.
Still, a film about his preparation might be even better than the movie we got when Leto describes his process in an interview with The Playlist, “I did it all. I was snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce by the middle of this movie, I had olive oil for blood. This was a deep dive I did. If you took a biopsy of my skin, it would come back as parmesan cheese! This is my love letter to Italy. There was a lot of work and preparation, and yes, I had an Italian accent, and I enjoyed and embraced that and lived in that space as much as I could, and for as long as I possibly could. I climbed into that creative cave and came out through the bowels and intestines into the esophagus of the one and only Paolo Gucci.”
And then there is Al Pacino as Paolo’s father, the gregarious Aldo Gucci who sees a kindred spirit in Patrizia and wants Maurizio to take the dynasty forward. We never get full Pacino, perhaps he felt man marked by Leto’s performance but when he kicks up a gear, the seats in the theatre shake from the acting heft of the 81-year-old. Like Ridley Scott we shouldn’t take Pacino for granted as he won’t be around forever and who will replace him? Jared Leto?
Yet for all the wayward glamour, the camp ignominy and the honey-glazed screen craft on display, we should remember that the real Maurizio Gucci was shot and killed in 1995, his murder planned by Patrizia. Tom Ford, Creative Director of Gucci for 14 years said, “I couldn’t have cared less about Gucci when I first went there – but soon after I arrived, I cared a lot.” You might not have cared for this soap opera at first but when you settle down into the baroque madness of it all, you will care that master craftsmen still make movies like this. A lot.