Post by Dracula on Dec 4, 2021 10:13:09 GMT -5
House of Gucci(12/1/2021)
You watch enough movies and you start to learn about certain topics that you otherwise would not be terribly interested in. For instance I, a man whose wardrobe almost entirely consists of overshirts bought at JC Penny and copywrite defying pop culture T-shirts bought on the internet, and come to know way more about “haute couture” and the industry that produces it than I ever wanted to know because the world keeps making movies about fashion. For example, by keeping up with the latest documentaries I found myself watching things like Valentino: The Last Emperor and the Alexander McQueen documentary McQueen; not things I would normally seek out, but people were talking about those movies so I gave them a watch. I also know way more about Gianni Versace because his assassination was the subject of the second season of American Crime Story and learned the name “Halston” because Ewan McGregor starred in a Netflix mini-series about that apparently famous designer. More in the abstract I know more than I wanted to know about the London fasion world of the 50s because Paul Thomas Anderson thought to set his 2017 film Phantom Thread in that milieu and I learned that Paris had a “fashion week” because Robert Altman decided to make Prêt-à-Porter. I also likely never would have heard the name “Tom Ford” had he not adopted filmmaking as a side project and made the films A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals recently… or at least I wouldn’t have heard of him until very recently as he becomes a small character late in the most recent fashion related film I found myself seeing: Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci.
House of Gucci begins in the 1970s with the titular “house” having been formed fifty years earlier and already existing as an empire, albeit perhaps an empire in decline. The company’s founder died in the 1950s and it is now run by his two sons: Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) and Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons). But our focus is on the emerging third generations of Gucci’s and particularly on Rodolfo’s only son Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). Maurizio seems like a typically aimless “rich kid” at the start but his life starts to come more into focus when he meets Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), whose family runs a successful but ultimately blue collar trucking company. Rodolfo does not approve of the pairing and disowns Maurizio when he refuses to leave her. This leads him to his uncle Aldo, who wants to keep Maurizio in the family and views him as being more competent than his own son, the rather foolish Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto), much to Paolo’s annoyance. Eventually Maurizio finds himself firmly an heir-apparent to the family business but his wife views his work as far from done. She sees Aldo running the business into the ground by diluting the brand’s mystique and together they come up with a scheme to take the reins from him, but it won’t be pretty and if you know anything about Maurizio’s fate you know that all of this leads to some dark ends.
House of Gucci is in many ways kind of a movie at war with itself, by which I mean that a lot of the people involved with it seem to have been going for different things. Let’s start with what the film’s screenwriters, Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, seemed to be doing. These two seem to take the movie very seriously and viewed it as something along the lines of The Social Network: a movie about ambition and betrayal within the cutthroat world behind the scenes of an iconic brand. On top of that the screenplay has kind of a Lady MacBeth dynamic going on between Maurizio and Patrizia as she prods him towards the head of the “house” and there’s also something of a true crime story in the middle of it all. Meanwhile, I think what attracted Ridley Scott to the project as an opportunity to look at the lives of extreme wealth and act as something of a companion piece to his film All the Money in the World. Scott (net worth: $400 million) increasingly seems to be interested in what money does to people and their families and I think he would have been interested in how this basically depicts a family losing an empire through affluenzic dysfunction. Both of these visions are more or less compatible with each other and notably involve a pretty serious look at this story and a focus on the House of Gucci as more or less interchangeable with any other high end business whose status as a fashion house is basically incidental.
The people who did not get the memo about all this are the actors, who clearly think they were cast in a Ryan Murphy show about outlandish tabloid figures. As you can tell from the summery this is a cast made up of American and British actors all playing various Italians and rather than take the “just use you normal accent” approach Ridley Scott favored in The Last Duel the film is largely in accented English that ranges from “nice try” to the downright ridiculous. Adam Driver is probably the one who’s trying to give the most “normal” performance here though I’m not sure his accent is any more consistent or accurate than the others. Al Pacino is a little closer to his normal shouty screen persona than some of the people here and is mostly notable in his willingness to seem like a somewhat grotesque old man in the movie. Lady Gaga is probably the one who’s going over the top in a good way one that’s almost necessary given that Patrizia Reggiani seems to be a pretty legitimately nutty person. Then there’s Jared Leto who is nearly unrecognizable under pounds of makeup which make him look like a sort of Mafioso Ron Jeremy and talks in an accent that makes him sound like a long lost Mario brother. He’s… doing a lot.
I have my doubts that Ridley Scott, a no nonsense filmmaker whose five years older than Joe Biden, was intentionally trying to turn the film into a piece of camp but, he was the one directing all these crazy performances and he can’t have been completely oblivious to what these people were doing. I guess on some level that’s because he knows that audiences aren’t going to be interested in the same thing from this story as he does so he let things get a little crazy along the way. But you know what? I think the movie still works. At a certain point Stockholm syndrome takes over and you just get used to the crazy accents and they stop bothering you, then you just let yourself get caught up in this wacky true crime story about outlandish people stabbing each other in the back. The seemingly contradictory tones of the various parties involved seem to kind of balance each other out into a certain alchemical equilibrium and Ridley Scott proves to just be talented enough to hold everything together. Make no mistake this movie is still kind of a mess with a host of melodramatic bits that are probably regrettable but I’ll be damned if I didn’t come away from it having had a pretty good time.
*** out of Five
You watch enough movies and you start to learn about certain topics that you otherwise would not be terribly interested in. For instance I, a man whose wardrobe almost entirely consists of overshirts bought at JC Penny and copywrite defying pop culture T-shirts bought on the internet, and come to know way more about “haute couture” and the industry that produces it than I ever wanted to know because the world keeps making movies about fashion. For example, by keeping up with the latest documentaries I found myself watching things like Valentino: The Last Emperor and the Alexander McQueen documentary McQueen; not things I would normally seek out, but people were talking about those movies so I gave them a watch. I also know way more about Gianni Versace because his assassination was the subject of the second season of American Crime Story and learned the name “Halston” because Ewan McGregor starred in a Netflix mini-series about that apparently famous designer. More in the abstract I know more than I wanted to know about the London fasion world of the 50s because Paul Thomas Anderson thought to set his 2017 film Phantom Thread in that milieu and I learned that Paris had a “fashion week” because Robert Altman decided to make Prêt-à-Porter. I also likely never would have heard the name “Tom Ford” had he not adopted filmmaking as a side project and made the films A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals recently… or at least I wouldn’t have heard of him until very recently as he becomes a small character late in the most recent fashion related film I found myself seeing: Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci.
House of Gucci begins in the 1970s with the titular “house” having been formed fifty years earlier and already existing as an empire, albeit perhaps an empire in decline. The company’s founder died in the 1950s and it is now run by his two sons: Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) and Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons). But our focus is on the emerging third generations of Gucci’s and particularly on Rodolfo’s only son Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). Maurizio seems like a typically aimless “rich kid” at the start but his life starts to come more into focus when he meets Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), whose family runs a successful but ultimately blue collar trucking company. Rodolfo does not approve of the pairing and disowns Maurizio when he refuses to leave her. This leads him to his uncle Aldo, who wants to keep Maurizio in the family and views him as being more competent than his own son, the rather foolish Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto), much to Paolo’s annoyance. Eventually Maurizio finds himself firmly an heir-apparent to the family business but his wife views his work as far from done. She sees Aldo running the business into the ground by diluting the brand’s mystique and together they come up with a scheme to take the reins from him, but it won’t be pretty and if you know anything about Maurizio’s fate you know that all of this leads to some dark ends.
House of Gucci is in many ways kind of a movie at war with itself, by which I mean that a lot of the people involved with it seem to have been going for different things. Let’s start with what the film’s screenwriters, Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, seemed to be doing. These two seem to take the movie very seriously and viewed it as something along the lines of The Social Network: a movie about ambition and betrayal within the cutthroat world behind the scenes of an iconic brand. On top of that the screenplay has kind of a Lady MacBeth dynamic going on between Maurizio and Patrizia as she prods him towards the head of the “house” and there’s also something of a true crime story in the middle of it all. Meanwhile, I think what attracted Ridley Scott to the project as an opportunity to look at the lives of extreme wealth and act as something of a companion piece to his film All the Money in the World. Scott (net worth: $400 million) increasingly seems to be interested in what money does to people and their families and I think he would have been interested in how this basically depicts a family losing an empire through affluenzic dysfunction. Both of these visions are more or less compatible with each other and notably involve a pretty serious look at this story and a focus on the House of Gucci as more or less interchangeable with any other high end business whose status as a fashion house is basically incidental.
The people who did not get the memo about all this are the actors, who clearly think they were cast in a Ryan Murphy show about outlandish tabloid figures. As you can tell from the summery this is a cast made up of American and British actors all playing various Italians and rather than take the “just use you normal accent” approach Ridley Scott favored in The Last Duel the film is largely in accented English that ranges from “nice try” to the downright ridiculous. Adam Driver is probably the one who’s trying to give the most “normal” performance here though I’m not sure his accent is any more consistent or accurate than the others. Al Pacino is a little closer to his normal shouty screen persona than some of the people here and is mostly notable in his willingness to seem like a somewhat grotesque old man in the movie. Lady Gaga is probably the one who’s going over the top in a good way one that’s almost necessary given that Patrizia Reggiani seems to be a pretty legitimately nutty person. Then there’s Jared Leto who is nearly unrecognizable under pounds of makeup which make him look like a sort of Mafioso Ron Jeremy and talks in an accent that makes him sound like a long lost Mario brother. He’s… doing a lot.
I have my doubts that Ridley Scott, a no nonsense filmmaker whose five years older than Joe Biden, was intentionally trying to turn the film into a piece of camp but, he was the one directing all these crazy performances and he can’t have been completely oblivious to what these people were doing. I guess on some level that’s because he knows that audiences aren’t going to be interested in the same thing from this story as he does so he let things get a little crazy along the way. But you know what? I think the movie still works. At a certain point Stockholm syndrome takes over and you just get used to the crazy accents and they stop bothering you, then you just let yourself get caught up in this wacky true crime story about outlandish people stabbing each other in the back. The seemingly contradictory tones of the various parties involved seem to kind of balance each other out into a certain alchemical equilibrium and Ridley Scott proves to just be talented enough to hold everything together. Make no mistake this movie is still kind of a mess with a host of melodramatic bits that are probably regrettable but I’ll be damned if I didn’t come away from it having had a pretty good time.
*** out of Five
