Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 37 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott
Quick Impressions:
I’m sure I’ll see this movie again because right now there is no bigger fan of Lady Gaga on this earth than my twelve-year-old daughter. The only person I’ve ever in my life heard speak of Gaga as often and as glowingly was Bradley Cooper during the Oscar campaign for A Star is Born. If I find out that Lady Gaga and my daughter have been secretly cooking each other spaghetti dinners, I really won’t be all that surprised. My daughter is obsessed. (I should add that this is convenient because I’m also a fan, and if I must listen to someone’s music non-stop, I’d just as soon it be hers.) (I could perhaps do without the incessant litanies of praise. Then again, hearing my daughter heaping praise on someone is a nice break from her usual tirades against the rest of society.) (The other day she literally ranted, “I feel like the only good person out there right now is Lady Gaga.”)
Understandably bitter not to be invited along on our movie date, my daughter is still vocally hoping Lady Gaga wins an Oscar for House of Gucci. (After seeing the movie, I’m skeptical.) (Well, less skeptical than convinced it won’t happen. But I don’t mind watching the film a second time so my daughter can see it for herself.)
Meanwhile, I’m also having a bit of a love affair with Ridley Scott at the moment. (Shh. Don’t tell him!) I recently re-watched Gladiator. Then (unlike most of America) my husband and I saw The Last Duel, and I loved it. (Surprisingly, my sister really liked it, too, and so we both got the brilliant scheme to have Thanksgiving dinner at Medieval Times! Thanks for the inspiration, Ridley Scott! I’ll let you know how this turns out.)
“He’s really focused lately on people with fame and privilege abusing their power,” I noted to my husband. “All the Money in the World, The Last Duel, and now House of Gucci, they all explore the same themes.” Not only did I love The Last Duel, but I loved All the Money in the World even more! (That strange gimmick (or perhaps just a principled statement) of replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer lured me into the theater for that one, but I found the film far more captivating than I had expected.)
House of Gucci is not like those other two movies, though. It’s not quite like any other movie I’ve ever seen.
The Good:
Tonally, this film is all over the place. It’s like (at least) two films in one, kind of a mashup of a made-for-TV version of The Godfather and Arrested Development (which is itself a made-for-TV version of The Godfather, right? Why else would the competent son be named Michael?).
Adam Driver is in a serious (but rather boring) drama. Lady Gaga is in a tragedy that cheerfully veers into camp without the slightest pretense of minding. Jared Leto (seriously!) could give this exact same performance in an episode of Arrested Development. (My husband kept saying, “The real person his character is based on had better be just exactly like that, or else he’s got to be shaking his fist in impotent rage from the grave.”) Al Pacino literally is the Godfather. Pacino dances through this tonal minefield with cheering exuberance, not caring one bit about genre at any given moment. Is he in a comedy? Is he in a drama? Why should these questions bother him? He’s always Al Pacino.
But I’m not Al Pacino, so I’m very confused about how I am supposed to react to this movie. Attempting to read intentionality is always a dicey business. (I remember being direly cautioned so many times as an undergrad in English classes, “You don’t know what the author intended! There’s no way to know what the author intended!” I don’t know what director Ridley Scott intended either! That’s for sure. I’m not even tempted to pretend. Does he want this to be a comedy? (If not, how could he let Jared Leto get away with giving that performance?) (It’s probably the best performance in the film, incidentally. At the very least, it’s the most consistent.)
Too bad the Golden Globes won’t be televised on NBC this year. The HFPA would nominate House of Gucci as a comedy for sure. (Maybe they still will. I know the Globes is still happening. I guess I need to look into the latest news on a possible telecast once I finish this review.)
Perhaps Lady Gaga will get a nomination for Best Actress. (She won’t.) But the character who made the biggest impression on me, the one whom I was still thinking about as I left the theater was Salma Hayek’s Pina. Who is this woman? Patrizia watches her on a commercial on TV, and suddenly she’s at her house, and she’s like her own personal witch-for-hire/best friend, and they’re taking mud baths together and putting curses on people, and also she went to kindergarten with professional murderers! I feel like this part of the story should have been fleshed out a bit more (which I’ll discuss later). But Hayek certainly makes an indelible mark with limited screen time.
That’s the thing about this movie. It takes an inordinately long time setting up certain aspects of the story. But with other (more tantalizing) parts of the story, there’s no set up at all. It just jumps wildly into these things and never adequately explores or explains them. And yes, I’m saying that here in the section of the review dedicated to what does work because I honestly think this baffling quality of randomness (that instills a perpetual sense of uncertainty in the audience) is one of the movie’s charms.
The whole cast is pretty good (though Driver’s character aggravates me tremendously). Just as Jared Leto plays a character sillier than most, Jeremy Irons is more restrained than the rest of the cast. (Surprisingly, this makes them great scene partners.) I’m always glad to see Jack Huston. I wish we saw more of Lady Gaga.
Without a doubt, her character Patrizia remains the most compelling and watchable in the film. I found her quite sympathetic (which is odd because she shouldn’t be based on her behavior and character traits). (I think it’s because I know she’s Lady Gaga. As we walked out of the theater, my husband said, “For most of the movie, I forgot that she was Lady Gaga.” I did not. I never once forgot that she was Lady Gaga. I don’t mean that as a mark against her performance though. I thought of her as Lady Gaga playing Patrizia.) She’s always a pleasure to watch to the point that I found myself wanting her to team up with Aldo and Paolo late in the film (which would make no sense. It’s just that they’re also a pleasure to watch). When she’s not on screen, we miss her. (At least, I did.)
I’ll admit that the fashion industry baffles me, but House of Gucci does offer plenty of eye-catching designs as well as food for thought about what it all means. The soundtrack is pretty snappy, too. I also liked Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography, particularly all the shots of Lady Gaga. (I just re-watched the trailer, and she often fills the screen.) (I wish the film itself showcased her as well as the trailer does!)
Best Scene:
Sometimes you watch and ask yourself, “Should I be laughing at this?” But you know it’s okay to laugh when Patrizia goes to talk to Paolo. Why does he compare his cousin to a tiny moose? This is also the scene in which we get to see Lady Gaga cross herself, saying, “Father, Son, and House of Gucci,” which is shown in the trailer. Throughout this entire scene, the film is undeniably a comedy, even though something quite sinister is going on.
Another favorite scene of mine is Aldo’s negotiation with the new investors.
I also like the moment when Paolo shows his designs to his uncle. (Leto is so buffoonish; Irons so menacing.)
Best Scene Visually:
I like the sex scenes in this film because they’re so—comedic? That’s not the right word for them exactly. But whatever strange tone the entire film has, the sex scenes not only exemplify it perfectly but dial it up to eleven.
Also fantastic visually is Lady Gaga wearing all the clothes. She wears costumes with such panache.
Great, too, is Paolo’s doomed fashion show when his wife (Florence Andrews) continues to stand there painfully singing as everything falls apart.
Best Action Sequence:
I was so relieved when Al Pacino came back. I thought we had seen the last of him, and the movie is so much more fun when he’s in it. I don’t think Uncle Aldo walking through the airport exactly qualifies as action, however.
The argument between Patrizia and Maurizio that turns ugly and gets physical stands out as the point of no return for their marriage.
The Negatives:
On some level, this movie has to be a comedy. But (despite how much fun I’m having writing this review), this isn’t some rollicking camp extravaganza. For a film that occasionally indulges in such moments of out-and-out silliness, House of Gucci doesn’t seem like a comedy most of the time. Often it’s quite measured and drab, at times even a bit boring.
There’s also a troubling lack of focus. As I watched, I didn’t feel like I was being guided through any sort of cohesive narrative (which is fine, I guess. It reminds me of The Simpsons, when Lisa says, “Perhaps there is no moral to this story,” and Homer chimes in, “Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.”) This is based on a true story, so we’re watching a bunch of stuff that happened happen, but as I watched, I felt like I was just meandering through events. I’m never a fan when a story (or especially a moral) is spoon fed (or force fed) to an audience, but House of Gucci goes a bit too far in the other direction. The thing is, events are happening, and time is moving forward, but we only get explanations for some of them.
From reading about the movie back when Lady Gaga was cast, I know that Patrizia Reggiani had a brain tumor for a while (that may or may not have contributed to the unraveling of her marriage and her decision to murder her husband). The movie does not even mention this. I’d like slightly more insight into Patrizia, her motivations, her shifting loyalties. Lady Gaga is a good actress. I want to see more scenes showing interiority, to see more of a transition from one phase of Patrizia’s life to the next. I am confident that Lady Gaga could show us these things, but she doesn’t really. She isn’t given the opportunity. She shows us Patrizia in one state, the next state, the next, but she never lets us see the emotional transitions guiding and motivating her. I’d like to see more evolution.
Also truly (and not just because I think she’s cool and I like Salma Hayek) I believe we need to learn more about Salma Hayek’s character. Patrizia clearly devotes a lot of her life to this woman. Their relationship needs more onscreen exploration. Many influential people talk to psychics or mediums hoping for guidance in life (especially back in the 80s and 90s. If the National Enquirer was telling the truth when I was a kid, then basically every famous figure had a personal psychic). But does every psychic take mud baths with you and help you hire murderers? I think not. This relationship is one of the most interesting parts of the story. The movie should devote more time to it, particularly because more scenes exploring the dynamic between Patrizia and Pina would reveal more and more of Patrizia’s interior state and give Lady Gaga more potentially Oscary material.
I also would like to know more about the relationship between Jack Huston’s character and Maurizio’s father. He and Patrizia seem so invested in reminding each other that neither is actually a Gucci. Huston’s character is a mysterious figure.
Also, Jared Leto’s performance is conspicuously more clownish and absurd than anyone else’s. Maybe the man he’s playing truly was a dysfunctional buffoon. I doubt his oddness was quite that obvious. If Leto’s performance were cut (or if he played the role in a more conventional, realistic, subdued way), the movie would have a more consistent tone. The problem, however, is that then the movie wouldn’t be as good. Leto’s performance sticks out like a sore thumb, yet it’s also so enjoyable to watch. Some of the most delightful moments of the film belong to Leto.
Before seeing the film, I’d noticed several headlines about a vocal coach on the movie noting that Lady Gaga’s accent sounds sort of Russian and not authentically Italian. As neither an Italian nor a dialect coach, I don’t have anything useful to note. (I can say that her accent is not completely ludicrous. I do get Natasha Fatale vibes when she speaks, but that’s less the accent than the cartoonishly evil quality of the character.)
To me, the mere fact that the cast is speaking with Italian accents is aggravating enough. It reminds me of that Harrison Ford movie (I think K19: The Widowmaker) in which the entire cast spoke English in Russian accents. If the entire cast is speaking the same language (and we’re just supposed to be pretending it’s English), it’s always strange to have them speaking with accents. If we’re not going to get any scenes entirely spoken in Italian, then why not just let everybody speak English with their natural accents? (Maybe that would be weird, too. I’m trying to imagine it that way now.) Jeremy Irons seems to have much less of an Italian accent than everyone else, but in some ways, that makes his performance more convincing and less comical.
I don’t expect Lady Gaga to get a nomination for Best Actress for her work here, but I guess you never know. She is Lady Gaga, and she is compelling as Patrizia. I wouldn’t be upset to see her nominated, but the film itself is so odd that I would be surprised at this point.
As I think back over the movie now, many moments seem amusing that did not as I watched them. There’s a strange absurdity to the whole story, making this movie more satisfying to reflect upon than to watch.
And now for a slightly off-topic question that tormented me time and again during this film: Why is Lady Gaga always in the bathtub? That happens in A Star is Born, too. She takes so many elaborate baths. (She doesn’t just hop it for a quick soak. There are always candles, food, mud, other people.) This isn’t truly a negative. In fact, I hope it’s a trend that continues in all her future movies, her signature cinematic move.
Overall:
House of Gucci is pretty fun to write about and sometimes even fun to watch. Lady Gaga is always compelling, and she’s working with an all-star supporting cast here to tell an extremely odd story. Perhaps it will improve on a second viewing. I’ll let you know when I see it again with my daughter.