House of Gucci

Prolific octogenarian producer/director Ridley Scott delivered two epic melodramas in the pandemic year 2021. The second of these, House of Gucci, which scored the awards-track release date, is nowhere near as good a film as Scott’s The Last Duel (released just two months earlier to minimal box-office) but it’s much more fun to watch. Based on the 2001 non-fiction book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden, House of Gucci is a highly fictionalized dramatization about how the Italian fashion dynasty was undone when of an ambitious, mafia-tied commoner married into the family.

Lady Gaga stars as Patrizia Reggiani, a sexy young Italian woman working as an office manager at her father's trucking business. When Patrizia meets the mild-mannered Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), a law student who is heir to 50% of the Gucci empire through his father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), she aggressively pursues him much to the chagrin of his father. When Rodolfo cuts Maurizio off, the two lovers marry and are immediately taken under the wing of Maurizio’s uncle Aldo, the debonair chairman of the iconic fashion company. Aldo is impressed with his nephew’s brains and taste, especially in comparison to Aldo’s own son, the witless Paolo (Jared Leto), who aspires to become a Gucci designer despite his total lack of talent. Patrizia’s unbridled commitment to achieving wealth and power triggers a reckless spiral of betrayal that unravels the family’s legacy.

House of Gucci is high camp in the purest sense of that term. It’s a big-budget, unironic A-list production across the board, yet every aspect is played at the scale of a Telenovela and sometimes a sketch comedy satire. Each lead actor seems to make their own independent performances choices with director Scott doing nothing to unify them (other than encouraging the use of Italian accents that would make Chico Marx raise an eyebrow). Leto, under layers of prosthetics, wigs, a fat suit, and crazy outfits mercilessly chews the scenery while Driver underplays. Irons utilize out every cliché of “sickly old man” acting while Pacino phones in one of his larger-than-life performances, which gets overshadowed by Leto going way past any acting choice has ever Pacino made. 

These leading men are fun to watch but Lady Gaga makes this movie. Not that her performance is any more credible than those of the guys, but her screen presence is electrifying. At 157 minutes, this is not a short picture, but things only drag when Gaga is off-screen. Whenever she’s in frame, which is most of the time, the picture is alive. She’s like an old-school movie star from Hollywood’s golden age who has created a TV sitcom for herself in which only she fully understands the tone of the program. This is only her second lead role in a movie, after her Oscar-nominated turn in A Star Is Born (2018) in which she was playing a role very close to herself. House of Gucci proves Lady Gaga is a bonafide movie star. Her eyes command the camera and, even though she dominates every scene, she makes each of her male scene partners come alive in their performances.

The two other female stars in the picture also play well off of Gaga. Salma Hayek (Desperado, Frida, Eternals) matches the pop star’s wild energy as an infomercial psychic who becomes Patrizia’s advisor. And Claire Cottin (the best thing about this same year’s Stillwater) provides a terrific contrast to Gaga as the more elegant and low-key glamour girl Maurizio becomes involved with after he spurs Patrizia. 

Getting an inside look at the political, sexual, and familial machinations of a wealthy family in the ‘70s and ‘80s should seem banal when there are so many contemporary outlets for such voyeurism. But this decadent star-studded melodrama is so much more fun than any reality TV shows about real housewives or Kardashians could ever be. It’s nowhere near as good as the prestige TV show Succession, but true camp provides its own kind of pleasure. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to watch this Crazy, Rich, Italians movie over Scott’s critically acclaimed but unforgivably dreary All the Money in the World (2017), about the suffering of dull, rich WASPs.