A Fashion Flop

H ouse of Gucci is like a walk across the cinematic equivalent of Canal Street, where shady merchants sell ersatz designer merchandise: Instead of a purse whose clasp falls off, the movie amounts to a dull, cheap knockoff of Martin Scorsese.

Films about flamboyantly dressed Italians setting out to kill each other are rarely dull, but 83-year-old Ridley Scott’s 27th feature drags. You may think it’s easy to journey down the decades the way Scorsese did, dazzling everyone with fantastic costumes and production design and building set pieces around pop tunes on the soundtrack while creepy people do sinister and hilarious things. Scott proves it’s hard to pull off, using familiar Scorsese techniques to tell a turgid, muddled story about murderous intrigue at the heart of a fashion label in Milan. For all of House of Gucci’s labored attempts at dark comedy, the only stuff that’s funny in it is the overacting and the mamma-mia Italian accents, which make everyone sound like Chico Marx.

In what we’re told is Milan in 1978, Lady Gaga plays a gold-digging secretary at a trucking firm whose eyes go cha-ching when, at a party, she happens to meet Adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci, the only child of aged Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons) and hence heir to half of Gucci, which Rodolfo shares with his New York–based brother Aldo (Al Pacino). The scene in which Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiano lights up while meeting Maurizio takes place during a fancy-dress disco party for maximum cinematic fabulousness, but in fact the pair met in 1970 and wed back in 1972.

Scott and his wobbly screenplay, by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, wander far from the facts, allow many scenes to go on too long, and do a poor job of developing one of the two central characters. The script is clear enough about Patrizia, a classic schemer; the role provides Gaga with a chance to gain weight and swan around in lots of different hair and clothing styles while generally being a sneaky harridan. Some will mistake these trappings for great acting, but Gaga lacks the ability to layer the character with complexity or even to make her funny.

Worse, as blandly played by Driver, who seems at a loss how to play his character, Maurizio is a cipher. Patrizia doesn’t interest him at first, and she is so obviously a climber who is throwing herself at him that it’s understandable why his dad would warn him not to marry her on pain of being disinherited. The potential consequences are explosive, and yet he seems to drift into marriage with her without much of a reason.

Once they’re hitched, Patrizia figures that the path back to the Gucci fortune is via Maurizio’s uncle. With a little nudge from her, Maurizio becomes a surrogate son for the retail king Aldo Gucci, who is disappointed (as any man would be) by his absurd son, Paolo (Jared Leto). Paolo is the clown prince of the movie, a would-be fashion designer whose ghastly belted corduroy jacket tells us everything we need to know about him. Scott, and Leto, obviously think the character is hilarious, what with his jowls and the pathetic ring of long fringe he wears around his otherwise bald head, but the mugging, the ridiculous getups, and the line deliveries all signal the same thing: Leto is desperate to be funny. Desperation isn’t funny. The more outrageous Leto tries to be, the more annoying he is. He says things like, “I will soar, like a pigeon!” in an over-the-top Italian accent, and it’s pure cringe.

The movie can’t quite decide whether it’s being told from the point of view of Patrizia or Maurizio as she falls into the grip of a fortune-teller (Salma Hayek) and he starts flirting with an old friend (Camille Cottin). Key questions are brought up only to be dropped. After disinheriting his son, old Rodolfo un-disinherits him, seemingly between scenes, with no explanation. One scene emphasizes the crushing burden of inheritance taxes in Italy, but then the subject is forgotten. Another scene has Maurizio fleeing tax authorities in Italy for Switzerland on a motorcycle in the snow, but later he’s back in Italy, again without explanation.

In contrast to the thrusting energy of Scorsese’s crime films, Scott allows his scenes to meander, never presenting the audience with any urgent question to be answered or any particular goal to be reached. Several scenes could have been excised entirely, and Scott’s choices of radio hits for the interludes in which the song is meant to tell the story (George Michael’s “Faith,” Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again”) are off-base all the way through the movie.

Until the last 20 minutes (which are the best 20 minutes), House of Gucci barely even offers any detail about how a great fashion business works. It isn’t until then that we learn that Gucci can be a sensation in the press due to the rejuvenating influence of its new lead designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) while losing record amounts of money after it cuts hundreds of the profitable little items that Aldo built the business around.

But was Maurizio a visionary who laid the groundwork for a spectacular rise in market value by hiring Ford? A playboy who ruined the company spending its profits on his personal pleasures? Or maybe just a passive nonentity whose wife made all of the key decisions in his life? The movie doesn’t leave us with a clear answer. If House of Gucci put half as much energy into character as it did into costumes, it would be a pleasure. As it is, it has about as much dramatic impact as spending 157 minutes leafing through a Gucci catalog.