Review | House of Gucci movie review: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino in Ridley Scott’s old-fashioned fashion scandal drama
- Lady Gaga’s turn in House of Gucci, as a woman who marries into the luxury fashion brand, is as mesmerising as her role in A Star Is Born
- Although Scott’s film is rather superficial and shiny, the true-life tale of murder and vengeance in the fashion world is worth a watch for the singer alone
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4/5 stars
Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, the young Italian woman from humble origins who spies her opportunity when she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) at a party in Milan in 1978. Training to be a lawyer, Gucci is part of the elite family behind the luxury fashion brand, co-owned by Maurizio’s father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and uncle, Aldo (Al Pacino).
Maurizio’s brattish cousin Paolo (Jared Leto) wants in on the business too, fantasising about designing his own clothing, but he’s a complete nincompoop who comes out with lines like “my bladder may be full, but my dreams are even fuller!”
Adapted from Sara Gay Forden’s book The House of Gucci: A True Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, Scott’s film is very superficial and shiny, as it whisks us from Italian palazzos to New York skyscrapers, while Pacino and an almost unrecognisable Leto can’t help but battle it out for most over-the-top performance, complete with flamboyant cod-Italian accents.
Spanning almost two decades, House of Gucci is loaded with operatic swagger, as Patrizia and Maurizio get married and power-play their way into the company only to head on a collision course with each other.
For those that don’t know the deadly outcome, it’s a shocking story, although Scott’s script never really gets under the skin of the characters – it being too taken by depicting the glossy lifestyles they live.
There are some neat comic touches, like Salma Hayek’s turn as Pina, a cat-loving tarot-card reader who befriends Patrizia and tells her, “I see a great fortune coming your way.” Leto, under layers of prosthetics, adds another grotesque to his collection, while Driver delivers a restrained and hard-to-read turn.
But in the end, all eyes will be on Lady Gaga, who commands the screen from her first scene to her last.
Running at 158 minutes, it’s overlong but not too emotional, which is problematic, but there’s something old-fashioned about Scott’s movie which is likeable.
These days, a story like this would likely be turned into a turgid limited series on Netflix. So there’s something to be said for packing House of Gucci into a feature-length drama. Maybe it’ll become the fashion again.
