A spoiler-heavy & deeply-subjective movie review.
Ridley Scott, what are we to do with you? Guy’s movies consistently underperform at the box office and yet he still keeps pumping them out, and studios are happy to let him. Why is that? We’ve all heard the story about when Kevin Spacey was edited out of “All the Money in the World” and Scott reshot his scenes with Christopher Plummer in one week (we also heard about how Michelle Williams was paid less than a HUNDREDTH of what Mark Wahlberg was to come back but, forget that, because Ridley Scott doesn’t have time for your bullshit). The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that his are the ultimate in money-laundering fronts: high-class picture-films with sky-high production values that add legitimacy to the Lizard People’s ever-domineering hold over the global sex-slave market. Or the Big Studios’ hold over the encroaching streaming & independent markets. Plus, he’ll shoot it for 20-bucks on a weekend: fast, AND cheap! Look, any idiot can make an “important” film on his iPhone now, but it takes a serious “auteur” like Scott to make an “important” film with unlimited resources at his disposal and STILL have it turn out to be plodding garbage that no one is interested in paying money to go see.
Scott has had the same filmmaking style since he started work in the ’70s and only ever makes movies in one-of-three different genres: historical epics; sci-fi; and “serious” drama. Even when you think he’s trying something different – with the Yakuza thriller “Black Rain”, for example – he’ll stop throwing curveballs halfway through when he feels he needs to sidebar the interesting stuff in place of his trademark “long boring scenes” with characters explaining what their motivations are without actually getting around to taking action fast enough. I don’t buy badass ’80s Michael Douglas sitting around moping that his partner got killed for 45-minutes before hacking dudes up with a katana in the last ten. Even Ripley took too long saving the cat at the end of “Alien”. It’s the storytelling equivalent of the “Talking Villain” trope – where the main bad guy can’t stop bragging about his plan when it would be easier to put a bullet in the hero and call it a day – but over the course of an entire movie. Scott made the original Alien & “Blade Runner”, and “Gladiator”, and the world is a better place for them. But why are audiences so turned off by seeing any of Scott’s movies from the last twenty years, when for the twenty years prior his name would have been spoken in-reverence alongside Scorsese or Kubrick? Not to say I haven’t enjoyed some of his recent output. Full disclosure: I love “Alien Covenant”. I think it’s the best of the series.
I also liked “Robin Hood”. But I like the story of Robin Hood, the dude. So a more realistic retelling of the story, directed by a guy whose bread-and-butter is making those kinds of movies is an intrinsic fit. I also grew up on the Alien movies and have my own opinions as a fan (“Alien 3” is the second-best movie, don’t care) so, again, Covenant had a big job answering some of the questions from “Prometheus” and I felt it was successful. But that’s a screenwriting concern – although it didn’t hurt having Scott come back and continue the aesthetic continuity between the films. Thinking more modern, “The Last Duel” was also good, but again, something tells me that had more to do with the acting, and Ben Affleck & Matt Damon’s script – although Scott’s comfort with the era being portrayed, again, didn’t hurt it. You can’t say that I’m not at least TRYING to defend the guy a little bit: Leonardo DiCaprio has never been in a bad movie, and Scott directed his “Body of Lies”, so…
Which brings us, disappointingly, to “House of Gucci”. Its biggest strength is its Star Power: Lady Gaga is this generation’s Streisand, and Scott knows it. The best shot in the entire film is of her face and its reaction to Al Pacino – in-frame but out-of-focus – telling her and her husband in no-uncertain-terms that they won’t take the company away from him. That they are nothing without him. Without the Gucci name. There is so much hurt on her mind that her face is almost of a devil-incarnate, losing focus. She has a palpable mania at the end too – particularly when she’s hiring Maurizio’s killers – and Gaga isn’t afraid to lose herself to flamboyancy with the character. Any guys put off by seeing the film because they think it’ll be too “chicky-chicky” if Lady Gaga is in it should know that she looks like she’s put on some healthy weight, and you see her bum. Iz nice. Iz also nice to see her strutting around in a pair of regular jeans compared to the couture she’s kitted with for the rest of the picture.
But that flamboyancy doesn’t end with her: the movie also stars fucking Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, and Scott’s new muse Driver in it, too. These are all some of the best actors of their respective generations: we know it, because they’re 90% of the reason we went to see the movie in the first place; and they know it, because all of them look like they’re having a great time. None of them have anything to prove to anyone, anymore. Sure, they all put on fake Italian accents (Irons doesn’t even try: he’s too old for that shit, clearly) and the dialogue is pretty soapy at parts, but they try their damnedest to elevate the “serious story” Scott is trying to tell with their own theatricality. None more so than Leto: his Paolo is the sad-sack Fredo of the on-screen Gucci family, and if his physical transformation – method or make-up – wasn’t enough, there’s no way Scott didn’t know what would end up on-screen when Leto showed up to work and gave him what he had on the first day of filming (what was with the orange Tic-Tacs? Was that Leto’s choice, or some small detail of the real Paolo’s?). Even Pacino, who hasn’t had a trademark “freak-out” on-camera in a long time, (SPOILER-ALRT) “gives us what he’s got” in a surprise return-to-form near the film’s finale. Overall, despite the dramaturgy it’s probably still some of the best acting you will see in a movie this year from established thespians. And – as a bonus – each of the five actors all get scenes with each-other on a rotating basis. So from an “Inside the Actor’s Studio” point-of-view, if you ever wanted to know how Gaga and Irons would be in a scene together, or Driver and Leto, or Leto and Pacino, then you can. But this isn’t supposed to be an educational tool: it’s a movie. And if the acting is the bones of the picture, then the skeleton of House of Gucci is one where all the pieces of a funny & self-aware, but terse biopic are there. You just have to make it palatable.
But the film is misadvertised. For whatever reason – but mostly from being a “Drag Race” viewer – when I saw the trailer, I could picture RuPaul’s reaction to it: a movie with Lady Gaga about the fall of the Gucci empire, set to the music & decadence of the 1980s? Bitch, what an EXTRAVAGANZA! Just imagine the behind-the-scenes shade! Keep imagining, because one thing House of Gucci is not, is salacious. Ever seen Ted Demme’s “Blow”? Iz good: Johnny Depp as a cocaine smuggler in a true-story crime-drama. That movie’s editing is relentless: time-passing montage-after-montage to the tune of ’70s rock, broken up in-between by your garden-variety biopic “greatest hits”. But where the film may be derivative in its “Goodfellas”-imitating structure, it makes up for in watchability: there is always something engaging happening on-screen, whether narratively, or aesthetically, or technically, and you’re never left to your own devices as a viewer. You are led down the garden path. Some may call that “simple-minded” or “candy photography”, but I call it good filmmaking. Ridley Scott does not have Ted Demme’s touch, and House of Gucci is not a fast-paced movie like Blow, when it should have been: it’s one carefully-staged scene after another, each of which plays out from beginning-to-end with one character entering the scene and another character leaving. There’s only so much of that classical presentation modern audiences can take before it starts to feel like you’re watching a stage play and not a MOVIE. Gucci is a FASHION brand: where are all the fashion shows like in the trailers? Where is the glitz and glamour and gala parties with people snorting coke in the bathroom? In fact, I don’t remember there being one single montage the entire film, but there sure were enough shots of cars pulling up to Rodolfo’s mansion: did Scott shoot all of those in one day or what? You can’t tell me that the day-to-day life of the Guccis was as miserable as Scott makes it out to be?
Plainly, he is the wrong director for the material. From his own natural inclination to treat the film like it’s this pristine, meta-extension of the Gucci brand itself rather than the sweatshop knockoff it should have been, not only does Scott cut back on the film’s camp appeal, but its accessibility too. I’m not a fashion guy, I don’t know anything about clothes, and if I need underwear I buy them bulk from Costco. Put some fucking text up on the screen every once and a while, Ridley: I don’t know who it’s supposed to be interviewing Maurizio for Vogue; I didn’t know the guy at the end was Tom Ford until they mentioned his name, after he’d already been in the movie for a half-hour. I’m sure for those “in the know”, having these fleeting moments of pop culture was welcome, but you shouldn’t be contemptuous to a general audience by giving them the finger if they don’t immediately get a reference. We are ultimately the ones who decide whether you should continue to be making movies (at least, I thought we were).
Scott’s ill-treatment of the viewer and their precious time can be surmised wholly by the wedding scene between Patrizia and Maurizio, played out to George Michael’s “Faith”. In a different movie, the film would take its cues from the song, and cut to a montage of their wedding party, then maybe Driver carrying Gaga into their new house – maybe fucking all over the place (since they already had pretty steamy sex in the work trailer; Adam’s a busy guy lately). It’d be slight – and certainly not original – but it would be visually-interesting; it would engage the viewer more with the characters, showing us a time when their love for one-another was perhaps more genuine; and there would be a certain subconscious fulfillment from it too, knowing that the film did what we expected it to do, with “that” song playing in the background. Instead, Scott continues to show the wedding. He shows them putting the rings on each-other’s fingers, in real-time, with little-to-no cuts. All the while, the song continues on the soundtrack: first verse; chorus; SECOND verse…. An argument could be made that this was “artistically-intentional”, and that it’s just a different, less-overt way of showing their bond, than a montage would have been. But you could show two seconds of them putting the rings on their fingers and I would still get the point: I don’t need to see it to THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF “FAITH”. Faith is a fun song! Give me something FUN for my modern brain to see! It’s so boring and lifeless, it sucks what little energy the film has, out, and from that point on I knew I had to dial back my expectations.
Where does Scott go now? Probably a Director’s Cut in a year-or-two, because he belongs to the same club as Coppola does, in that he can’t stop touching his homework once he’s already handed it in. Sometimes this pays off: the four-hour cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” is widely-seen as superior to the three-hour theatrical cut. I say, who approved a four-hour Ridley Scott movie in the first place (probably was only contracted to be three-or-less but, you know, he’s Ridley-fucking-Scott, he can do what he wants, I suppose)? House of Gucci is driven by its five lead performances, in that Scott literally just let them do whatever they want as far-be-it for him to tell a Master like Adam Driver how to drink a cup of coffee. He then appears to surround his actors with the most mundane directorial choices trying to elevate what should be a spectacle of the absurd into high-art, in complete contradiction to what we’re actually seeing delivered on-screen. When Patrizia is in court at the end of the film and she refuses to answer the Judge unless he calls her “Gucci”, there is something lost in translation from actor, to lens, to screen. Gaga understands, but it’s doubtful Ridley ever did. It’s clear he’s just filling a quota.
//jf 12.11.2021
Poster sourced from ladygaga.fandom.com.
theory of a daskeman 