House of Gucci

2021 | rated R | starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, Selma Hayek | directed by Ridley Scott | 2h 38m |

I thought about supply and demand a lot during House of Gucci. Not the demand for top shelf Italian designer handbags and clothes from the Gucci line. Most of my association with Gucci is from Eight Grade. No, Hollywood supply and demand. Hollywood doesn’t just run the U.S. movie industry, there is a massive movie awards circuit industry grafted onto it, whether it’s the Academy Awards themselves or the numerous offshoots. Those award networks need products to award. Multiple products to pit against each other to compete for those awards to attract eyeballs to the award shows and publications. Movies need actors to do press tours, but the press also needs actors to do press tours. I was also reminded of Fran Leibowitz famously saying that there is a finite amount of talent in the industry. That the movie industry has to be built around the expectation that they need to produce x amount of movies a year without the expectation they will have that level of talent year over year. Hollywood is like the drug company, that invents the illness so it can sell you the product. They run both ends of it. So there will be years where they need to produce a product specifically designed to feed into that award show circuit. How often does that happen? That’s what Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci comes off as.

To describe the plot of the film would be to describe the plot of almost any Oscar-bait product. It lines up a bunch of prestige and talented actors, puts them in period clothing, has them do Italian accents, tells a true story, is headlined by a star turn and says absolutely nothing of substance in it’s entire 2.5 hour running time. It’s a shallow film made of fashion, beautiful locations and wish fulfillment. It follows the story of Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga)’s marriage to Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), son to Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons), nephew to Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) and heir to the family fashion empire that he doesn’t want, as she bores deeper into the ranks of the Gucci family business power dynamics to take power herself.

Gucci is kind of, sort of, about Patrizia’s greed and intoxication with power, but she never really does anything drastic or step over anyone’s toes to gain influence with the Gucci’s. It’s kind of, sort of, a depiction of the Gucci’s as a modern mafia that controls the market, but despite all the bluster and threats of “I’m a Gucci!”, they don’t actually do anything to make someone fear them, to show their power. This movie is all tell, no show. In the third act, the film flirts with a melodramatic tone that could have pushed it into fun camp. It’s kind of funny the way Driver throws a plate on the ground and Gaga shows up in jeans to chain smoke and bark out demands at two hitmen.

This particular story doesn’t have the drama and intrigue of the awards-bait film template it is being forced into. There is no meat to it, and nothing the screenwriters want to excavate in it to illuminate some universal truth about society. We get a crime and a murder and Patrizia taking on knock-off handbags. We get Pacino yelling and exotic locations. Patrizia drags herself up the family ladder and Scott tries his hardest to turn it into The Godfather without the moral intrigue or suspense. I hated every minute of it.

All style and wish-fulfillment, House of Guccci is more product than story. A movie that looks like a quota being filled by an A-list director working at half speed.  It’s award show fodder, to keep the celebrity marketing machine humming. To keep countless TV, radio, magazine and social media accounts buzzing with speculation about what someone said on the promotional tour and who will win an award. It’s an industry and all movies are part of it. This one just more obvious than most.  And that is the absolute last curtain you want lifted behind your entertainment.