HOUSE OF GUCCI is based on a true story, one filled with wealth, power, ambition, family, tradition, high fashion, and murder, a story that plays like Italian opera, equal parts tragedy and farce. Ridley Scott directs, and the lush production stars Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Jared Leto.
Filled with gorgeous period clothes and cars, lovely sets and locations, mostly in Milan, and fine photography, HOUSE OF GUCCI delivers visual delights and jet-set style in this story that runs from the ’70s to the ’90s. The raw story material of a grand operatic epic is there too, but somehow HOUSE OF GUCCI never achieves epic levels, although it does make for a pretty good true crime thriller, set in a posh world of wealth and Italian fashion, with a satiric bent. HOUSE OF GUCCI was adapted from Sara Gay Forden’s non-fiction bestseller by writers Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna. It is one of those story that would leave audiences skeptical if it weren’t true.
Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), the pretty young daughter of the owner of small trucking company, meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) at a party, when she mistakes him for the bartender. As soon as she hears his name, she is taken with the shy scion of the famous fashion house. Maurizio is similarly dazzled, calling her Elizabeth Taylor rather than her name. Although he is too shy to ask her out, the resourceful Patrizia finds a way through Maurizio’s armor. Although Patrizia is definitely working-class, little educated and working as a secretary for her father, while Maurizio is a scholarly law student who is not much interested in his family’s fashion business, she adds a spark of fun his life lacks. It’s love, and soon he is willing to defy his coldly aristocratic father Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons), who thinks Patricia is both low-class and a gold-digger. Dad’s not entirely wrong but his son marries her anyway, despite threats of being cut off.
Patrizia’s father (Vincent Riotta) gives the now-homeless student a job, and the pair find happiness in a little apartment. For a while the film unfolds along this path, a sexy romantic comedy, with the couple enjoying an idyll in a small apartment, Maurizio ironing his own shirts and horse-playing with co-workers.
Patrizia does her best to charm her way into the Gucci family, by building bridges. Making little headway with her chilly father-in-law, she finds a pathway with Maurizio’s uncle Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino), who shares running the family firm with his brother Rodolfo. While Rodolfo is aristocratically aloof, Aldo is warm and charming, inviting the couple to visit him in New York, and treating Patrizia to a shopping spree in the family store. He seems as much to want to befriend his niece-in-law as much she wants to be accepted as part of the Gucci family, although Aldo has his reasons for that.
Aldo invites the couple to family gathering where Patrizia meets the extended Gucci family, a sequence that is a delight of over-the-top characters and comic misadventures. Chief among those characters is Uncle Aldo’s son Paolo Gucci (an unrecognizable Jared Leto with facial prosthetics), a chubby, balding, loudly-dressed klutz who fancies himself a fashion designer. As his father puts it, more than once, “Paolo’s an idiot but he’s my idiot.”
Then this fun, romantic comedy romp gives way to something darker, a twisty crime thriller with family intrigue, drama, back-stabbing and finally murder. When Patrizia marries in, the Gucci business is very much a family business handed down through generations, a well-oiled machine with its own internal rules. Patrizia becomes the wrench in those works, sparking events that never would have happened otherwise, with consequences no one could foresee.
HOUSE OF GUCCI is certainly an entertaining film, particularly fun in the more comic earlier part. But as the film becomes darker, it stumbles a bit with that turn, with the various parts sometimes failing to mesh. At a running time of over two hours, all those moving parts need to work together for it to step up from good film to the great film it could have been.
Ridley Scott gives us actors speaking English with Italian-ish accents, set in a glorious Milan straight out of old movies. This rather tongue-in-cheek approach will amuse some audiences and irritate (or maybe even offend) others. There is a strong farcical element to the first portion, so the shift to crime thriller and tragedy almost feels like you are watching a different movie, although the satiric undercurrent is still there. Audiences might also be divided on Lady Gaga’s performance, feeling she is the best thing in the film, or the weakest link in the more problematic second part, although she is perfect in the first.
The cast is stellar, if the casting is a bit puzzling at times. Adam Driver nicely plays the awkward, shy Maurizio with a firm reserve. By contrast, Lady Gaga is splendid to start as Patrizia, a broadly-drawn character more out of “Good Fellas” than anything else, whose grammar is not great and whose cultural knowledge is seriously lacking. But she is certainly fun, as she tells Maurizio when they first meet. Plus, Gaga and Driver have an unexpected mismatch chemistry together.
Jeremy Irons is at his chilly best as Rodolfo Gucci, a cold fish who can barely manage any affection for the son he claims to adore, while living in the past with memories of his late wife and long-ago movie career. In contrast, Al Pacino as his brother is the complete opposite personality, all affection and family warmth, using charm to get what he wants. The brothers are on opposite ends of the business spectrum as well, with the New York-based Aldo eager to embrace branding and coffee mugs with the logo, while Rodolfo is about tradition and dignity for the Gucci brand.
Rodolfo relies on lawyer and advisor Domencio De Sole (Jack Huston, who has his own interesting pedigree with grandfather John Huston), who is almost family although not a Gucci. At some point, Patrizia picks up her own trusted advisor, a fortune teller, Pina Auriemma, played by Salma Hayek, although the advice is mostly ego-stroking, a fateful choice.
Where the trouble for the movie, as well as for the Gucci family, comes in is when the film takes it’s darker turn, from fun and farce to thriller and tragedy. What happens blends ambition, greed and murder, in a stranger-than-fiction true story. If you don’t know the history, it is better to just wait and watch it unfold on screen. However, whether the script that is at fault or something else, Patricia’s character seems to undergo changes that do not fit well with what went before, which seems to muddy the film as it makes this shift.
All the over-the-top events of this story, both tragic and absurd, are matched with some over-the-top performances, particularly Jared Leto. All that suggests Ridley Scott intended this film as satire. It partly succeeds as in that, as a grand, operatic one at that, although the second, tragic part feels less focused.
HOUSE OF GUCCI is an entertaining, engrossing film that mixes crime thriller with farce. While it is a good film, an enjoyable film, one can’t help but feel it could have been more. All the elements were there for a great film, starting with the true story. It just didn’t get there, although it is still worth the ticket price. HOUSE OF GUCCI opens Wednesday, Nov. 24, in theaters.
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
