Lady Gaga captures every scene in House of Gucci, and she’s backed up by a stellar supporting cast. But the film somehow ends up going far too soft on the Gucci family’s absolute sociopathy and appallingly hideous clothes.
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But that’s the magic of editing, tightening up the material and making it pop. Marketing teams are sadly better at this than many top Hollywood directors.
The film is centered on the rise and fall of Reggiani, daughter of a trucking company owner, who by marrying Gucci scion Maurizio (Adam Driver) places herself at the center of a great fortune, a fashion house, and a made-up noble lineage. Her voice-over narration at the beginning of the film, crooning over the “sweetness” of the name Gucci and all the wealth and power it represents, establishes it as her story, and it’s her final act of vengeful annihilation that ends the film, as well as any family participation in the business, which rocks on profitably without them.
It seems Lady Gaga spent eighteen months in character as Patrizia, which is surprising, because I’d have sworn she carried the whole thing off through sheer performing-veteran charisma. She’s practically the whole show, striding around furiously in tight dresses and spike heels and big hair that seems to get bigger and blacker the more double crosses she pulls. When she’s off-screen, there’s a notable sense of deflation.
As with Gaga’s film debut as the lead in the latest version of A Star Is Born (2018), it’s not clear if she’s a good actor or just a film presence with a whole lot of pizzazz. She’s got arresting looks on film, beautiful from one angle and almost ugly from the next, but the sheer changeability of her face is remarkable.
And she’s got a lot of competition in scene-stealing in House of Gucci. Adam Driver is always highly watchable, but he’s hampered by his role as the stiff, constrained dork Maurizio, who’s a lawyer and supposedly the brains of the younger generation of the Gucci family but doesn’t do much to show it. Jeremy Irons is typecast as Maurizio’s sickly, decadent, fake-aristocratic father, Rodolfo, who temporarily disowns him for marrying such a manifest gold digger. Al Pacino brings exaggerated brio and humor to his role of the shrewd Uncle Aldo, who’s ruined the Gucci reputation in high fashion circles but kept the money rolling in by capitalizing on cheap Gucci knockoffs selling on every street corner.
And then there’s Aldo’s pudgy, pitiful son Pablo (Jared Leto), whose delusional conviction is that he’s a talented fashion designer and would be a huge success if only the family would give him a chance. This causes Aldo to say, in his kindest assessment of his son, “He’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot.”
Leto is practically talking like “That’s a spicy meata-balla” in his efforts to be outrageously comic-Italian and earn an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Given all that ham-actor rivalry, it’s amazing how successfully Lady Gaga holds the screen.
But then, for sheer fascination, it’s hard to beat anyone playing the Lady Macbeth role. She targets Maurizio as soon as she hears his magical surname, “Gucci,” seduces him, enthralls him sexually, and marries him over family objections that leave his half of the church empty at their wedding. Though he claims he’s never been happier than when working at her father’s trucking company, she makes sure the Gucci family heals the breach before his father dies, so Maurizio inherits a 50 percent share of the Gucci fortune and business. She begins her ruthless management of the Gucci empire by manipulating the weak-willed Maurizio to shaft various relatives. And he begins to hate her for it.
That’s why it’s so weird that, just as Patrizia is going mad with thwarted ambition and therefore getting more and more interesting to watch, she disappears from the narrative for long sequences. Some feature just Maurizio with his new girlfriend, Paola Franchi (Camille Cottin). She’s an old-money friend: blonde, thin, “classy,” and as inclined to wear all white as he is.
Particularly with Maurizio, there’s a strong tendency to present himself as a figure of almost disinterested virtue, the only one of the family that admits to the working-class origins of their fortune — which began with an enterprising bellhop studying the luggage of the wealthy staying at the hotel where he worked, so he could open his own luggage shop. And he’s the only one who tries to break away from the corrosive effects of Gucci's wealth.
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