‘House Of Gucci’ Review: Ridley Scott’s Tale Of Fashion & Betrayal Overflows With Excess

Excess is synonymous with the Gucci brand. The haute couture institution invites its customers to share in the opulence enjoyed by its founding family through their merchandise, imbuing each slouchy dress and chic little purse with the luxury of their palatial Italian villas and matching fortunes. Even before a leathery-looking Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino, perhaps the non-Nicolas Cage actor most associated with the incidental virtues of doing a lot) explains this much, Ridley Scott’s gaudy statement piece “House of Gucci” demonstrates a general understanding that its tonal target should be located somewhere over the top. Everything looks like it’s part of a single overpriced world meant to dazzle, an ostentatious fashion wonderland which ultimately clashes with the often pedestrian direction and unfocused script. Sporadically amusing, without going nearly far enough, the film never hits the camp highs we’ve been led to expect from a story implicitly dusted with cocaine no one’s ever actually glimpsed snorting.

READ MORE: ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ Review: A Loving Tribute To Harold Ramis Is Sabotaged By Fan Service, Overwrought Affections & Itself

It’s hard to imagine a fully grounded, low-key telling of the sordid scandal that ensnared Aldo’s nephew Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver, most concerned with preserving his dignity as a Serious Actor and, accordingly, the dullest performer in the film) and his beloved Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga, behaving more like a countess or baroness drunk on her own authority). Passion, betrayal, hysteria, and wanton Italian gesticulation-yelling are all integral to the account of their doomed union and its dissolution, related here in the multi-prong structure of the HBO true-crime miniseries this feature should’ve been. The trouble is that their amour fou has to compete with other internecine familial conflicts and business squabbles, neither of which have the mad zing of Gaga’s closed-door machinations. Between a sprawling 157-minute run time, the scenes condensed by rhythm-destroying editing, and the bits included in the teasers but excised from the theatrical cut, the thought of a far longer and freer iteration of the film intrudes on the viewing experience. In this one respect, the quality of being overstuffed isn’t a strength.

As the acting goes, however, more is more. Signora Gaga charts a path to hell as the fabulously contemptible Patrizia, starting as a middle-class girl so doe-eyed in her meet-hot with Maurizio that we might believe she likes him for more than his surname. (A trailer-rattling hump sesh between them, the rare passage attaining the correct fever pitch of absurdity, offers another rationale for their instant connection.) As she sews herself into the business side of the Gucci dynasty, her unslakable thirst for money, control — what her trusted psychic (Salma Hayek, awkwardly slotted into the plot) simply dubs “everything” — warps her into the ‘80s Norma Desmond version of herself. Her performance and the ambiguous accent leading it both grow more heightened with every passing scene’s descent into depravity, meaning that she only gets really good as we lurch toward the conclusion. All the same, Gaga makes the bold decision to go all in on the bone-deep badness of this real-life woman, never stooping to gin up some redemptive flicker in her boundless self-interest. 

Everyone else does their own thing, their styles and registers at odds in thoroughly mixed-up exchanges of dialogue. (Jeremy Irons, as Maurizio’s father and half-owner of Gucci, doesn’t even bother trying to cover up his English drawl.) The actor most precisely attuned to the ideal level of kookiness turns out to be Jared Leto as Maurizio’s cousin and the Guccis’ resident Fredo, his overacting finally placed in a context where it suits the material. As a paunchy, balding loser dead-set on proving his baseline competence, he’s the most tragic figure in a milieu filled with characters whose appeal tops out at “delectably awful.” The intergenerational four-way power struggle between him, Maurizio, and their respective dads mostly just takes up a lot of air, its main utility being to somewhat rationalize Patrizia’s megalomania after they exclude her from official executive dealings on sexist grounds.

Narratively garbled and morally muddy, this is instead a work of loose delights: pastel-pink jackets, a peppy playlist thick with disco, the odd instance of spite-urination, a hilariously stilted sit-down to plot a murder. These assorted pleasures don’t cohere into much beyond set-dressing for Gaga’s sexed-up monster-movie gravitas, drifting from vamp to vampire. Considered as a star-text alone, the film is functionally enjoyable (and will inspire Halloween costumes for the next fifty years), but it’s hard to accept lowered expectations with Scott having delivered a more accomplished, fully-honed film a few brief weeks ago. Caught between the half-willingness to be in on its own joke and the aspiration to seriousness, Scott breaks the cardinal rule of fashion: however you dress, make sure everyone can see exactly what you were going for. [C+]

“House of Gucci” hits theaters on November 24.