Ridley Scott, the revered director of cinematic classics like Alien and Blade Runner, has predominantly defined himself with gritty tales of the human condition, encapsulated through somber genre trappings that veer toward archaic science fiction, action and swords-and-sandals molds rather than anything more chipper and progressive. However, in the latest chapter of his rugged career, he has also demonstrated a penchant for shaping tone and style when he isn’t fixated on the bleak, such as the riveting The Martian, which astutely counteracted all its grave grandiosity with keen levity, or recently released The Last Duel, which potently reconstituted Medieval tableaux with nuanced #MeToo subtext.
Despite his recent innovations, Scott was nonetheless a curious choice to helm House of Gucci, a film that quickly touted itself as a glitzy melodrama in trailers that crackled with high-brow needle drops and the effervescent presence of popstar-turned-actress-turned-“I would literally shop at the Gap for her” Lady Gaga. This admittingly splashy potboiler, though, is also more pensively solemn in its execution as Scott approaches the infamous greed of the titular fashion family empire with seething disdain and mirth to counteract their deceptive veneers. A deliberately desaturated satire teeming with an eccentric roster of scoundrels, Scott relishes in observing these snakes slither without necessarily gratifying them with unwarranted sympathy, like a classic literary tragedy if Romeo and Juliet were also overtly (some of) the villains the entire time and the latter was the one to intentionally inflict that cruel jolt of death over the former.
In the alluringly audacious and narratively cluttered House of Gucci, based on the true tall tale of murder and wealth extensively covered by tabloids, we’re essentially voyeurs to the corrosive garishness of not only a clan of raging narcissists but also their brand that perpetuated capitalism at its most toxic, especially in tandem with the notorious excess of the 1980s. It’s a lurid romp for an array of human socioeconomic contexts so innately operatic that their culmination couldn’t help but be scandalous. Scott subverts and embraces this sensationalism with feverish flair, underlining a uniform vulgarity that had been commercially peddled as opulence in this gleefully tacky, if sporadically unwieldy, scuzz-headed stepchild to The Godfather.
The year is 1978 in Italy, so deceitfully idyllic, and cinematographer Darius Wolski’s muted sepia tones signify a jagged milieu that would gravitate toward romanticism if it weren’t for the sobering reality of those firmly confined to its margins. Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a middle-class commoner of discreetly cunning ambition, encounters the bashful Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), studying to be a lawyer and evasive to his legacy, at a swanky party. Gaga modulates her Patrizia with both a self-possessed fervor and inward vulnerability as the conniving yet compelling woman exerts a gravitational pull to Maurizio, her eyes scorching with desire at the decadent notion of the Gucci name as she perches herself over the bar. Patrizia promptly coaxes Maurizio into initiating a romantic relationship and becoming involved in the family business; their sultry yet distant chemistry is but a guise for Patrizia’s subterfuge, and their marriage is the final nail in a bedazzled, decaying coffin that was the cultural status of Gucci before the new millennium, spurring an unraveling of betrayal and infighting.
What ensues is a sprawling and occasionally unfocused fever dream that searingly swoons at the disingenuous schemes of its cheeky cast of characters, including the prim Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), who disapproves of Patrizia’s insular nature and disowns his son Maurizio, and a giddily idiosyncratic father-son duo of the towering yet oblivious Aldo (Al Pacino) and the buffoonish Paolo (Jared Leto doing A Thing™ while slathered in prosthetics), whom Patrizia and, to some degree, Maurizio pivot to for support before posing them as scapegoats to stage an inter-familial coup.
As this dubious saga expands into the 80s and the only thing more immense than the hair and abstruse outfits is the pervasive dominance of capitalism, a dramatic tension comes into fruition as each respective member of this family attempts to ingratiate themselves onto this shifting landscape, from the commercial reluctance of Aldo to the lofty zeal of Patrizia. The kitschy performances from this esteemed group anchors the film’s potentially erratic tone into a refined set of exuberantly ostentatious caricatures with insightful bite, even as the film devolves into something more aimless. The underlying structural issue is that Gaga is the tonal linchpin of the movie, embodying the kaleidoscope of the cast’s performative stylings, but the film excessively allocates attention to Driver in the latter half and, thus, skews as dour and tedious.
Nonetheless, Lady Gaga’s icy pathos and internalized fragility are a magnetic juggling act as she empathizes with a riff on the woman-scorned archetype, integrates herself into the film’s collective inditement of obscenity, and overall ensures that Patrizia’s portrayal never teeters on misogynistic. Adam Driver’s meekness, which eventually festers into domineering actions that marginalize Patrizia in the wake of her manipulation, particularly encapsulates the central thesis of wealth’s deterioration that distorts identity into grand theatrics. Leto is also grippingly blustery, so astronomically gratuitous that it eventually reverts back to being inspired, and Pacino aptly compensates by grafting some dramatic gravitas onto their dynamic.
Ridley Scott shrewdly calibrates a soap opera aesthetic to reflect these brooding machinations, an airless vastness that would be too arid if it weren’t for piercing moments of campiness like Leto’s Paolo, the guileless black sheep of the family, spitefully urinating on a scarf or the camera deliriously circling around Patrizia as she discovers pale imitators of the Gucci brand that encroach upon her newfound privilege. Perhaps the most devastatingly hysterical moment of this sardonic spoof, however, is when Maurizio obtusely gives Patrizia a Bloomingdales gift card for Christmas while his mistress (Camille Cottin) received something far more haute. Patrizia’s anguished, stifled gaze says it all: He might as well have killed her for bestowing an item this modest, and she’s chomping at the malicious, sparkle-tinged bit to reciprocate that animosity, regurgitating a glittery plan to assassinate him, formulated with the peculiar soothsayer Pina (Salma Hayek) in a spa mud bath.
“Don’t… miss,” a bewildered Patrizia, now clad in baggy jeans and not the latest chic, orders to two men she and Pina haphazardly recruited for her final act of duplicitous love, her pointed finger shaking so frantically that it may finally crack the artificial poise she had painstakingly cultivated for years. House of Gucci is simultaneously an exercise in irony, contempt and perception, albeit one that does exude the full panorama of intentional to unintentional bombast, but it’s ultimately ferocious entertainment with an achingly hilarious twist- a bitter cautionary tale about the price of not being genuine, one with an even higher toll than the garb of the eponymous brand.
Grade: B
House of Gucci is now available in theaters.
Photo Credit / MGM
