House of Gucci (Annapurna Pictures, BRON Studios, MGM, United Artists, Universal [home video], 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 27), after Charles and I watched the Lifetime movie Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story, I decided to bypass the next two items on Lifetime’s schedule (Don’t Scream, It’s Me – about a woman whose boyfriend has just been let out of prison after 15 years and comes back, threatening to break up her marriage to someone else – and Buried Alive and Survived). Instead I played through a Blu-Ray disc of the 2021 film House of Gucci – and was woefully disappointed in it even though I’d loved Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book The House of Gucci, on which the film was nominally based. It was especially disappointing given the level of talent both in front of and behind the cameras: the stars were Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto and Samla Hayek, the director was Ridley Scott and the writers were Becky Johnston (story) and Roberto Bentivegna (screenplay). Forden’s book was a wild ride that began with the murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by two hit people, Ivano Savioni (Andrea Piedimonte Bodini) and Benedetto Ceraulo (Vincenzo Tanassi), hired by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga, t/n Stefania Germanotta) and her friend, psychic adviser Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek). It then turned into a history of the Gucci brand and its founder, leathermaker Guccio Gucci, and its gradual transformation from a company that made handbags (with its signature bamboo handle, implemented when the League of Nations embargo against Italy for invading Ethiopia in 1935 made it impossible for them to get enough leather to make the whole bag out of it) to an icon of High Fashion.

Guccio Gucci started the company in 1921 and he had three sons, Aldo (Al Pacino), Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and Vasco. Johnston and Bentivegna made their first mistake with the movie when they abandoned Forden’s Lifetime-esque structure of opening with the murder; instead they began it with a meet-cute between Maurizio, Roberto’s son, and Patrizia. Roberto warns Maurizio that Patrizia, the daughter of the owner of a trucking company, is only interested in him for Gucci’s money – in Forden’s book Roberto is depicted as an ultra-controlling father who has spent most of Maurizio’s life crushing his dreams, but much less of that comes through in the film – but Maurizio goes ahead and marries her. The film spends way too much time indoors in various Gucci board rooms and offices – among other dubious decisions, it leaves out the America’s Cup yacht that was one of Maurizio’s prides and joys – and largely fails to dramatize the bitter family conflicts that did their best to tear Gucci apart even before Maurizio brought in outside investors (a company called Invescorp that was funded by various Arab leaders seeking investment opportunities for their petrodollars) who ultimately forced him out completely (no blood Gucci has been involved in the Gucci enterprise since 1993). The only trace of a family rivalry is the hapless character of Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto), Aldo’s son, who in life was a bitter rival whom Maurizio first enlisted as an ally and then double-crossed. In the movie he comes off as a comic-relief character, complete with a prosthetic makeup that took four hours to put on (just one less hour than it took to change Boris Karloff into the Frankenstein Monster).

Ridley Scott directs with a dogged sluggishness, as if he left his sense of pace back in the science-fiction dystopias of Alien and Blade Runner, and the cast consists of old pros like Pacino and Irons basically phoning it in. As Maurizio, Adam Driver is about as good as you could expect from today’s pool of actors – I can’t imagine anyone better suited to the role unless you could go back to the past and clone Cary Grant, but though Driver is quite a good actor in the right sort of part he doesn’t have the boyish charm of Maurizio as described in Forden’s book. There are some great moments in this movie, like Rodolfo reliving his long-forgotten days of movie stardom in Italy (he was a minor comedian rather than a superstar) in full Sunset Boulevard style, obsessively screening his old films on 16 mm; and Patrizia crossing herself and saying “Father … son … house of Gucci.” (According to one of the post-film “making-of” documentaries, that line wasn’t in the script; Lady Gaga improvised it during shooting.)

The film’s one saving grace is Lady Gaga’s performance; in one of the making-of featurettes Ridley Scott is shown talking about how singers often make good actors as well, and while they don’t always (for every Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand who were terrific actors on screen, there were people like Perry Como, Tony Bennett and Whitney Houston who bombed), his argument that a great singer is acting with his or her voice for the three to five minutes of a song and therefore should be able to sustain his or her characterization for the length of a feature film. He mentions Lady Gaga’s previous film, A Star Is Born, but I think she’s a lot better here, partly because she doesn’t have the formidable competition she had in A Star Is Born from Constance Bennett, Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand; and partly because Patrizia Reggiani is a more complex character and offered her a richer role into which she could really sink her teeth. I’d like to see Lady Gaga do more acting work (just as I’d like to hear her keep recording the Great American Songbook even after the death of Tony Bennett, partner of hers in two great albums of standards that proved she has a much greater sense of phrasing than most people who’ve made their reputations in electronic dance music) and can only hope she gets roles fully worthy of her in movies more alive to the possibilities of their casts, characters and situations than was House of Gucci.

My husband Charles and I also both liked the use of music in the film, consisting partly of Italian-language pop (including a quite good and entertaining cover of “I’m a Believer,” the song Neil Diamond wrote for The Monkees, sung in Italian by a woman, Caterina Caselli) and partly of English-language U.S. and European songs of the period, including Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” “I Feel Love,” and “Bad Girls” (one could make the case that Donna Summer should have had the career Lady Gaga is having; in the slow introductions to songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio” Summer showed that she, too, had the instinct and ability to phrase a song), David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again” and a few older-style songs like Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” It’s also a movie that reinforces F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement, “The rich are different from you and me,” and not just because – as Ernest Hemingway replied, “Yeah, they have more money.” The rich of Fitzgerald’s time never failed to remind him that, however much he made as a successful writer, he wasn’t really one of them because he’d earned his money instead of inheriting it, and one of the most fascinating aspects of Forden’s book that did not make it into the movie is the sheer sense of entitlement that motivated crimes like Aldo’s evasion of U.S. taxes (Forden describes tax evasion in Italy as one of those things that didn’t consider that big a public deal because “everybody does it,” and while that’s partly true in the U.S. as well, the Internal Revenue Service has historically been a lot more concerned about tax enforcement than its Italian counterpart) and Maurizio’s frantic flight to his redoubt in Switzerland to avoid prosecution for financial crimes in Italy (which is far less dramatic in the movie than it is in Forden’s book).