The poster of House of Gucci.
The MGM.
House of Gucci is opening on Tuesday night and is probably the best chance of any of this year's Oscar hopefuls becoming a theatrical hit. Will Smith's King Richard had a chance in hell last weekend, but I don't want to get too excited. The splashy, tawdry and unapologetically grown-up fashion-centric crime caper/melodrama has earned its share of outside-the-bubble buzz due to the promise of campy hijinks and the sheer star power of its top-billed star. Will audiences show up for a non-franchise, R-rated movie because they are Little monsters? If so, I think Disney will make a movie about Harry Styles and Lady Gaga will be declared a movie star.
Will the movie do well at the box office, as well as the theoretical Oscar season hopes for Gaga and Leto, and will it be any good? The Last Duel was one of the best films of the year. It is not hard to see why a grim, R-rated medieval melodrama about a rape accusation didn't scream "escapist date night at the movies." The House of Gucci has some loose elements. Men view women as disposable commodities no matter their status or social disposition. The film is a long and lumbering 2.5 hour movie that details most of the most interesting story elements and character beats in its first hour.
The picture is based on a book by Sara Gay Forden called The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed. Everyone in the cast is able to play. There is a case to be made that the low-key Adam Driver and Jeremy Irons represent old-school style in their roles in the movie. It makes sense that Gaga is a bit of both.
As a young woman who romances her way into the family and then attempts to maintain the legacy of her new surname, Gaga is eager to star as someone other than a fictionalized version of herself. Patrizia Reggiani is a fiery flirt and persistent despite initial hesitations of her would-be romantic conquest. Driver is a reluctant cold fish in both romance and business. Being cast out from the family fortune isn't entirely a tragedy when dad protests his engagement to a lower-class stranger. Whether she loves the socially awkward but stupidly handsome and rich beau or whether she presumes he will be welcomed back if she waits long enough, it is an intriguing dynamic.
House of Gucci wants to be about a battle between two opposing sides of a fashion empire, one of which wants to make money and the other who wants to prioritize quality over quantity. Patrizia throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings, understandably siding with her husband, while also taking a more ruthless tact in terms of the family business, which doesn't provide much intrigue or entertainment value. The whole business subplots don't amount to much after seeing Gaga try to play three-dimensional chess with her in-laws. The idea of centering Patrizia as a master manipulator instead of a bystander toward inevitable ruin is probably a hindrance, as is the boring truth.
The film has a fine appearance by Hayek as a woman who becomes Gaga's late-in-the-game comrade as the latter becomes less essential to her family, but Driver's major character shift in the third act seems to have occurred off-screen. It never helps to wonder if you missed a scene during the initial viewing of the film. The final third is an epilogue that takes place after the story is over. Maybe it is about the commercial desire to center its biggest movie star in a narrative that is only tangentially about her. The result is a movie that twists itself in pretzels to justify avoiding the person who should be at the center of the storm.
In the first hour, we get the best of both worlds, as we get the best of both worlds in terms of business and pleasure. The film runs out of gas very early. Maybe the story it tells isn't completely cinematic. Maybe it doesn't need to place an as-good-as-she- needs-to-be Gaga at the center because the plot of the family at war over the business is more poignant than the melodrama. House of Gucci would be a bad movie with some strong moments if it weren't for the Oscar race and the rarity of such big-scale adult dramas of this nature. It feels like an arrow in the heart of a dying industry when it fails in 2021.
