House of Gucci
Graham Craycraft
Unfortunately Lady Gaga’s and Al Pacino’s performance cannot save this movie.
House of Gucci is Ridley Scott’s 2021 historically based story of the fall of the family run business Gucci. Not to say the business no longer exists, but what once was an empire controlled entirely by the Gucci family is now void of anyone named Gucci. There are some major flaws with this film and not enough positive aspects to save it. Let’s dive right in.
First and foremost is the language. This is a story that begs to be made as an Italian language film. The idea that the audience should suspend their belief as characters slip between Italian accents and the occasional Italian phrase is not fair to the audience. These are not Italian- American mobsters in New York. These are native born Italians living in Italy. Why wasn’t it made in Italian? Well quite simply because the people who made the movie don’t speak Italian and most of the big name cast doesn’t either. Moving this idea to an Italian language film means sacrificing a big budget and big names such as Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, and Jeremy Irons. Suspension of belief can only take the audience so far.
The story also waffles between a campy romantic-comedy and a dark, jealous drama. Each time it transitions it throws the audience out of the story and we are left wondering which mood it is trying to achieve. Dark dramas do not have to be wooden or melodramatic. Rather good dramas covering dark subject matter are improved by use of humor to provide occasional relief to the audience as well as being realistic. There were some good comedic aspects in House of Gucci that weren’t funny because the movie already lost its audience in an array of rom-com montages and bad pop music. Jokes were ruined as were great dramatic scenes. Al Pacino delivers an emotionally explosive scene and laughs fill the theater in a moment that was supposed to be heavy!
The acting performances overall were quite good, but good acting with bad direction and a poor script cannot save a movie. Characters seemed to move from love to animosity in the blink of an eye without giving cause as to why. The audience could not keep up because the film did not let it. This film begs to be a dramatic, dark, corrupt story because that is what it actually was in real life. And Italian, let's not forget Italian.
40/100
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