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If “ The Godfather ” and “Succession” had an ostentatious lovechild, it would look something like Ridley Scott ’s “House of Gucci,” the master’s sweeping yet wildly imbalanced rendering of the titular and celebrated fashion empire’s scandalous history, full of backstabbing, betrayal, greed, and even murder.

Based on the book by Sara Gay Forden , it’s a spicy enough foundation that comes with sufficient amounts of flamboyance, one that sees Lady Gaga convert into an ambitiously tacky character, features an unrecognizable Jared Leto dialing yet another transformative shtick up to eleven, and contains plenty of exaggerated English-spoken-with-an-Italian-accents that stretch and twist random words through cutely fluctuating emphases on every other syllable. “Then what’s the problem,” you might rightfully ask about a campy package that sounds wholly entertaining on a fashion-soaked, star-studded, feast-for-the-eyes canvas? It’s perhaps helpful to quote a character here, who assigns the shorthand of “a movie set” to the propped and preppy Ralph Lauren, “a rock concert” to the vibrant showiness of Versace, and “the Vatican of fashion” to the refined legacy of Gucci. Now, imagine all these dissimilar looks on a hodgepodge runway that’s supposed to reflect the voice of a single designer. That confusing collection is “House of Gucci,” a film that would have benefited from a coherent silhouette and a little hemming of its tiresome runtime.

Still, Scott’s soapy epic—his second cinematic outing this year after the superior (and also partly campy) “ The Last Duel ”—isn’t exactly a bore, thanks to a number of its actors (like Leto) unafraid to lean into the film’s kitschy tone as well as some fearless moments—like one sensationally go-for-broke sex scene—that meet them at that amplified level.

A fierce Lady Gaga leads the pack in an uneven performance, portraying Patrizia Reggiani—an assertive young woman from limited means who falls in love with and marries Maurizio Gucci (a disproportionately subdued Adam Driver ), the dreamboat scion of the fashion house. When Patrizia gets rejected by shy Maurizio’s traditional and haughty father Rodolfo ( Jeremy Irons )—he quietly shames Patrizia’s lack of cultural finesse—she finds a welcome ally in Uncle Aldo ( Al Pacino ). He is the quality and class-insistent Rodolfo’s calculating brother, with a commercialist attitude that differs from his sibling’s when it comes to reviving Gucci’s flailing image in the ‘70s and rising above the brand’s whispered-about financial hardship.

Also in the mix is Aldo’s son Paolo, brought to life by Jared Leto, whose outrageous (and extremely fun) gaudiness single-handedly earns the aforesaid “rock concert” analogy. Leto’s approach to the role instantly proves apt for Paolo, an incompetent businessman wannabe and an aspiring fashion designer with little taste and even less talent. Spite and bad-blood brew amongst the clan throughout the story that spans three decades, especially after Patrizia sneakily talks Maurizio out of his law school dreams, muscles her way into the family business, and turns her husband against pretty much every member of the family. Through it all, Salma Hayek ’s naive psychic Pina guides the increasingly distraught queen-bee Patrizia with prophecies about the future, lending the film some of its most hysterical scenes.

If only the cast could decide what kind of a movie they were all in. You could say Adam Driver is excellent in the role of Maurizio, but his measured mannerisms feel so out-of-step with the version of “House of Gucci” that Leto or Hayek seem to think they’re in—in that regard, he operates in an entirely different movie, one that Lady Gaga occasionally joins in when she’s not on a different wavelength. You sense this tonal inconsistency elsewhere too, throughout the script by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna that alternates between a stern drama and a goofily heightened melodrama with a perverse sense of humor that scores various laughs, many of them unintentional. It’s only when the film has the audacity to embrace the latter part of its split personality that “House of Gucci” works, even soars. But that confidence unfortunately doesn’t come to fruition often. The resulting film rapidly loses steam in its last act, while it tails the ill-fated and once vulnerable Maurizio as he willingly steps to the dark side of his powers like a Michael Corleone with slicker fashion sense and revitalizes Gucci as the multi-billion-dollar premier designer we know today. ( Reeve Carney makes a good up-and-coming Tom Ford in these segments.)

Unsurprisingly, visual design is how “House of Gucci” leaves its strongest impression. With a story set across Rome, Milan, New York and even the Alps—where Maurizio and Patrizia vacation, and an incredible Camille Cottin makes an appearance as Maurizio’s romantic-interest-to-be—the movie highlights the luxury and lavishness of the Gucci lifestyle with grace and utmost attention to detail through Arthur Max ’s intricate production design. (Most of the film was apparently shot in and around Rome as well as the storied Cinnecitta for the interiors.) Costumer Janty Yates predictably comes out of the project as its MVP, especially in the way she sculpts Lady Gaga’s Gina Lollobrigida-esque looks and character journey—from her early flouncy unworldliness to her sharply cut outfits and later on, vulgar getups—and informs the actor’s performance that veers into something animalistic. Perhaps more impressively, the designer’s impeccable suiting (made mostly bespoke by a NY-based tailor, with additional pieces by Ermenegildo Zegna) brings out the neatly combed Driver’s masculine elegance in a way no film ever has.

But these visuals are just a special-effects of sorts, elements that keep “House of Gucci” on its feet when the film trips on its overlong train elsewhere. You come to it for a sophisticated boutique experience, but what you walk out of feels awfully close to an overstuffed department store.

Available only in theaters starting November 24th.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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House of Gucci (2021)

Rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence.

158 minutes

Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani

Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci

Jared Leto as Paolo Gucci

Jeremy Irons as Rodolfo Gucci

Al Pacino as Aldo Gucci

Salma Hayek as Giuseppina "Pina" Auriemma

Camille Cottin as Paola Franchi

Jack Huston as Domenico De Sole

Ridley Scott

Writer (based on the book by)

Sara Gay Forden

Writer (story by)

Becky Johnston
Roberto Bentivegna

Cinematographer

Dariusz Wolski
Claire Simpson
Harry Gregson-Williams

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‘House of Gucci’ Review: Murder, Italian-Style

Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino and Jared Leto serve up a heaping platter of prosciutto in Ridley Scott’s tale of family treachery.

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By A.O. Scott

The kindest thing I can say about “House of Gucci” — and also the cruelest — is that it should have been an Italian movie. Set mostly in Milan, it spins out a sprawling, chaotic, borderline-operatic tale of family feuding, sexual jealousy and capitalist intrigue, with plenty of drinks, cigarettes and snacks (the carpaccio comes highly recommended). Also cars, shoes, hats, sport coats, handbags, dresses, lingerie — whatever you want!

But for all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing. The true story of how the Gucci family lost control of the company that still bears its name — and of how its scion, Maurizio Gucci, lost his life to a hit man’s bullets — could have inspired Bernardo Bertolucci to heights of decadent spectacle, Luchino Visconti to flights of dialectical extravagance or Lina Wertmuller to feats of perverse ideological analysis. The raw material plays as tragedy and farce at the same time.

The actual director, Ridley Scott, possesses ample style and impressive craft, but at least this time around seems to be lacking the necessary vision or inspiration. (His underrated “All the Money in the World” was a tougher, tarter treatment of similar material.) The script, by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (based on Sara Gay Forden’s book ), has a repetitive, wheel-spinning quality. Most of the scenes consist of Guccis yelling at other Guccis — in Milan and New York, amid the Alps and near a lake, in hotels and conference rooms and villas and cafes. The shouting, in heavily accented English, lasts from the early ’70s to the mid-90s, and you can tell what year it is by scrutinizing the clothes and haircuts. For a while it seems like the music cues (David Bowie, Eurythmics) might also help, but at some point in the ’80s the playlist gets scrambled.

About those Guccis. You’ve heard of ham? Well, this is a family-size salumi platter. Adam Driver is relatively restrained as Maurizio, who as a law student meets Patrizia Reggiani at a party, where she charmingly mistakes him for a bartender. She comes from a less exalted family — her father owns a small trucking company — and she is played by Lady Gaga with the verve of an Anna Magnani avatar in a Super Mario video game.

This is fun for a while — the movie is more than two and a half hours long — and Gaga and Driver have an interesting chemistry. Maurizio is quiet and a little passive, but Patrizia nudges him toward a bolder idea of himself. He defies his aristocratic father, Rodolfo (an impeccable, sepulchral Jeremy Irons), who regards Patrizia as a social climber and a gold digger. He isn’t altogether wrong, but Maurizio marries her anyway, and finds brief happiness working for his in-laws, trading in his cut-to-measure suits for proletarian coveralls. He plays soccer and horses around with the other drivers and mechanics during lunch break until Patrizia summons him to the office to attend to his conjugal duties. It’s pretty hot stuff.

But as the mood shifts from sex comedy toward loftier, more somber matters — money, loyalty, family honor — “House of Gucci” manages to become both overwrought and tedious. The older Gucci generation is divided between Rodolfo and his brother Aldo (Al Pacino), who runs the New York side of the business. Casting Pacino and Irons as siblings is a witty move: at this stage in their careers, both are highly mannered, sometimes almost self-parodic performers who exist at opposite ends of the thermal spectrum. If Irons were any chillier, he would crystallize. If Pacino ran any hotter, he’d burst into flame.

To complicate the kinship network, and to prevent a potentially dangerous outbreak of understatement, Aldo has a son, Paolo, who fancies himself a fashion genius and who is played by Jared Leto. You’ve heard of ham? Leto goes full mortadella, bulked up and stuffed into a pink corduroy suit, billowing tobacco smoke and throwing himself into paroxysms of agita. His most memorable line is “Boof-ah!”

There is potential here for camp, for glamour, for something louche and nasty and over-the-top. Did I mention that Salma Hayek plays a fortuneteller who becomes Patrizia’s sidekick and adviser? But all the emoting is crammed into a curiously literal, procedural frame, as if someone had tried to make an opera libretto out of court transcripts.

Patrizia urges Maurizio to cultivate alliances with his uncle and cousin, and then schemes to push them out, but rather than being interestingly contradictory her motives just seem incoherent. As Maurizio’s marital ardor begins to cool and he forsakes her for a glacial blonde (Camille Cottin), Patrizia’s focus shifts from commerce to revenge.

By then, “House of Gucci” has lost the thread of its own story and collapsed into contempt for its characters, who are terrible businesspeople on top of everything else. A postscript appears onscreen to inform us that Gucci, no longer a dynastic family concern, is now a lucrative global luxury brand, a bit of non-news that arrives as a muted happy ending. It turns out that this isn’t really tragedy or farce, grand opera or opera buffa: it’s corporate promotion.

House of Gucci Rated R. Mamma mia! Running time: 2 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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House of Gucci Reviews

Lady Gaga, Adam Driver & Pacino are amazing in this Jared Leto Sounds like Mario when he jumps off a cliff and dies & The production Design was very Gucci! Alongside the make up and costumes!

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Are you supposed to laugh during a true-crime film about the Gucci family losing their fashion empire?

House of Gucci fails to work on two levels. First, as a historical family drama, and second, as a campy, good time. What’s left is a lumbering movie that’s unable to offer an interesting look into the Gucci dynasty.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

House of Gucci attempts to be a board room thriller and TV show dynasty production; in theory, this sounds acceptable, but neither writer crafts a captivating scenario.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2023

[Ridley] Scott resorts to a format closer to a soap opera by using and abusing a series of gimmicks... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Dec 19, 2022

Much like Leto’s performance, House of Gucci is likely to polarise audiences. It is glamourous and gaudy but also tedious and tiresome and, for what is supposed to be a compelling crime story, the result is a confusing mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

With any other cast, House of Gucci would have been a subpar movie, floundering through the ripped-from-the-headlines intrigue of a murder-for-hire, but with this cast, Ridley Scott has created a wickedly fun romp.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 24, 2022

This is more than a film about fashion; this film is an Italian family epic in much the same style as THE GODFATHER, but based on a true story.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 18, 2022

House of Gucci shifts through several tones as it spotlights the dark side of power, pleasure, and privilege, but it’s anchored by an endlessly entertaining ensemble - and specifically, the supernova star that is Lady Gaga.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

For about two-thirds of “House of Gucci” I was onboard....But everything comes to a screeching halt in that third act and the movie suffers for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

This film could have been all that, could have been an Oscar contender. It has so much going for it. Big fashion, true crime, and so much name-dropping. But it goes right off the rails in its second half...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 15, 2022

No plans to re-watch, did not enjoy, way too long, convoluted…laughed, was camp!

Full Review | Aug 4, 2022

They let this go to print? Surely not...

A ruthless portrait of Patrizia Reggiani's ambitions... the real center of this story that is cruel towards her at the end, but also towards us. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 21, 2022

While these performances will probably doom the film come awards season, they are the movie’s saving grace. The sheer silliness of the proceedings neutralize the film’s attempts at plumbing the dark side of wealth and the corruption...

Full Review | May 10, 2022

The campy scenes make the straight drama scenes feel under-energized and dull, while the straight drama scenes make the campy scenes feel over the top and unintentionally hilarious.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 10, 2022

Textually it is like a tabloid newspaper. Visually its fine art. More often than not the two do not blend together well.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 1, 2022

Scott's proposal seems entertaining to me when he brings together a handful of luxury actors to narrate, with a fine and glamorous tone, the melodrama of that fashion dynasty fragmented by greed, betrayal and family grudges. Full review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 1, 2022

This saga, which leaves no-one untarnished, may be viewed as an old-fashoned morality tale.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2022

...yet another unfocused misfire from an increasingly lackluster director.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 22, 2022

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Australia edition
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Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani in The House of Gucci.

House of Gucci review – Lady Gaga murders in style in true-crime fashion house drama

Ridley Scott’s pantomimey soap entertainingly tracks fractures in the fashion world as Patrizia Reggiano plots to kill her ex, Maurizio Gucci

R idley Scott’s fantastically rackety, messy soap opera about the fall of the house of Gucci is rescued from pure silliness by Lady Gaga’s glorious performance as Patrizia Reggiani, the enraged ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci, grandson of the fashion-house founder Guccio Gucci. She singlehandedly delivers the movie from any issues about Italianface casting: only she can get away with speaking English with the comedy foreign-a accent-a. Every time Gaga comes on screen, you just can’t help grinning at her sly elegance, mischief and performance-IQ, channelling Gina Lollobrigida or Claudia Cardinale in their early-50s gamine styles. There is a truly magnificent scene in which Patrizia is wearing nothing but weapons-grade lingerie in the marital bathroom – and yet somehow Maurizio, played by Adam Driver, is even more sexy in his demure monogrammed pyjamas.

Until seeing this film I had no idea that in 1995, Reggiani, through a bizarre confidante and professional psychic called Pina Auriemma, played here by Salma Hayek, paid a hitman to kill Maurizio , so incensed was Reggiani by his infidelity and the resulting divorce. It is like hearing that Karen Millen thought about whacking her husband or finding out that the retailer Michael Marks planned to garrotte Thomas Spencer outside Marble Arch tube station. But there it is.

Gaga shows us a Patrizia who is an aspirational young woman, a black-belt minx who is also profoundly innocent, with a secretarial day job working for her dad, a socially humble but well-off haulier. In 1970, she shows up at a Milan disco and meets-cute with gawky, lanky Maurizio Gucci, a law student with no great interest in the family business. He is played with gallant diffidence by Driver wearing a pair of big glasses – a mandarin-geek look I associate with Yves Saint Laurent .

They fall in love, to the furious disdain of Maurizio’s father, Rodolfo, played by Jeremy Irons with one of those moustaches that you create by shaving downwards from the nose to create a kind of charcoal line along the upper lip. He is a pampered former movie-matinee idol who gave up showbiz to rejoin the family firm and now suspects Patrizia of being a gold-digger. But Patrizia and Maurizio get married, an event with which Ridley Scott and editor Claire Simpson create a showstopping transition: Driver and Gaga have full-on sex in her dad’s office which at the moment of Patrizia’s orgasm cuts to her beatific appearance in church in her bridal gown. A sexualised epiphany of loveliness.

Lady Gaga with Vincent Riotta in House of Gucci.

So Patrizia is to meet (and charm) the rest of the family, including Maurizio’s deadbeat loser cousin and wannabe designer Paolo: a bald, overweight guy played by … Jeffrey Tambor? No. It’s Jared Leto in some serious latex. And then there’s Maurizio’s genial uncle Aldo, played with a certain type of distrait charm by Al Pacino. This casting triggers a certain question: sure, dopey Paolo is Fredo, but who is Michael Corleone in this scenario? Maurizio or Patrizia? Yet just as Patrizia is coyly masterminding her man’s future dominance in the company, he is ungratefully fixing to sideline her after being re-enamoured of a certain upper-class acquaintance: Paola Franchi, played by Camille Cottin.

House of Gucci – adapted by screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna from the non-fiction bestseller by Sara Gay Forden – is enjoyable despite, or because of, Scott’s touristy, pantomimey approach to Italy and Italian culture. Yet with real storytelling zest the director punches up every scene, often with some very old-school musical cues: trad opera almost every time. ( Paolo Sorrentino would have played it differently but maybe nowhere near as entertainingly.) There’s some very broad dialogue: trying to concentrate on his design ideas but horrified at the thought of his dad going to prison for tax evasion and fraud, Paolo screeches: “How can I think about my LINE when Dad could be DROPPING THE SOAP?” When I saw this, the entire audience flinched as one, everyone thinking: “Please tell me we aren’t going to get a scene with Al Pacino in the jailhouse shower.” Thankfully, no. But Scott must have thought about it.

In the end, this is Lady Gaga’s film : her watchability suffuses the picture, an arrabbiata sauce of wit, scorn and style.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Crime films
Ridley Scott
Adam Driver

Review: Lady Gaga brings down the ‘House of Gucci’ in Ridley Scott’s lavish couture-clash drama

A woman in a fur hat, fur coat and sunglasses stands behind an open car door in the movie "House of Gucci."

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

Monarchies may fall and empires may crumble, but for the moment, epic family dynasties still reign with a vengeance on the screen. Those impatient to learn what awaits House Roy in “Succession” can tide themselves over in the meantime with “Dune,” with its futuristic clash between the spice barons of House Atreides and House Harkonnen. Or perhaps they might warm themselves with the fiery antiroyalist screed of “Spencer,” which tracks Princess Diana’s desperate flight from the House of Windsor. And now along comes “House of Gucci,” Ridley Scott’s canny and engrossing movie about an Italian luxury brand and a family brought low by greed, fraud and vicious infighting, plus a notorious black widow played by a coldly electrifying Lady Gaga.

We get a taste of that bitter end at the beginning. The movie opens on March 27, 1995, mere minutes before Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), the fashion house’s former head, is gunned down in Milan by an assassin hired by his vengeful ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga). Scott cuts away before the killing occurs, in a way that can’t help but echo the violence-anticipating prologue of “The Last Duel,” his recent movie about the travails of a 14th-century Frenchwoman. Here, hundreds of years later, is another moment of calm before the storm and also another story of a woman caught up in an overbearingly male world of power and intrigue.

One crucial difference is that while the heroine of “The Last Duel” is sold into a bad marriage, Patrizia wills herself into one. She’s at a party in Milan in 1970, giving off Elizabeth Taylor vibes in a head-turning red dress, when she first meets the diffident, bespectacled Maurizio, who’s so awkward — but charmingly so — that it takes her a beat to realize he’s the heir to the famous Gucci fashion house. A reluctant heir, admittedly, who plans to practice law, shows little interest in the family business and is entirely naive about why Patrizia might have him locked in her sights. They soon marry, defying Maurizio’s father, Rodolfo Gucci (an elegant, exacting Jeremy Irons), who takes one look at his future daughter-in-law and guesses what she’s after.

It’s hard to see how anyone couldn’t guess, since Patrizia’s darkly glittering eyes, which stop just short of burning holes in the screen, so nakedly telegraph her every desire. As in her previous unhappily ever after Cinderella story, “A Star Is Born,” Lady Gaga temporarily dons a working-class shell, downplaying her natural magnetism in order to maximize it. Before long, Patrizia stands revealed for what she is: an avatar of ambition and, like Gaga herself, a couturier’s delight, born to wear the silver-sequined evening gowns and furry après-ski ensembles dreamed up for her by costume designer Janty Yates. More than anything, Patrizia is a woman of insatiable hunger: She practically devours Maurizio in one molto vigoroso sex scene, and she looks ahead to the day that his millions — and his powerful place within the competitive Gucci family hierarchy — will be hers as well.

A man and a woman in a dimly lighted room in the movie "House of Gucci."

The bonds of family are extended first by Rodolfo’s brother and business partner, Aldo Gucci (a boisterous, affectionate Al Pacino), who welcomes his new niece with open arms. He’s the company’s entrepreneurial genius, the one who continued his father Guccio’s mission to transform a Florentine family-run business into a global brand. Maurizio and Patrizia soon relocate to New York (and have a young daughter, Alessandra) to work in Gucci’s Manhattan stores. And before long, Rodolfo is dead, leaving his half of the company (in a roundabout fashion) to Maurizio and setting a furious round of power plays in motion. There are stormy confrontations and hostile takeovers, forged signatures and prison sentences, grim financial assessments and odd psychic readings (the last delivered by Patrizia’s friend and future accomplice, Pina Auriemma, played by a very game Salma Hayek).

Patrizia takes a keen pride in the business — the market for cheap Gucci knockoffs infuriates her — and, like a chain-smoking, mud-bathing Lady Macbeth, spurs her husband toward increasing acts of ruthlessness against his own family. One of their easier marks is Aldo’s black-sheep son, Paolo, who fancies himself a great designer but whose incompetence and vulgarity seem to seep out of his pores like sweat. He’s played by Jared Leto, unrecognizable under a bald pate and prosthetic jowls, in the kind of garishly extreme transformation that has become this actor’s lip-smacking MO. It’s an attention-grabbing stunt; it also works like gangbusters, particularly because Leto’s performance — hilarious, sympathetic, full of tragicomic pathos — feels precisely scaled to the demands of a movie that often revels in its own posh, padded vulgarity.

I mean that mostly as praise; it’s also a sure sign that Scott and his collaborators — including screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, here adapting Sara Gay Forden ’s 2000 book — have fully comprehended their subject. The line between art and trash is always a porous one, in high-end goods as well as cinema. And not unlike some of the totems of luxury on display here, “House of Gucci” is a calculated, highly controlled amalgam of the stylish and the tacky. It’s also remarkably savvy about the inherent kinship between fashion and cinema, something Rodolfo himself acknowledges when he reminisces about his own past career as a film actor, as well as the iconic floral scarf he commissioned for Grace Kelly.

This is a company that, at least since Ingrid Bergman clutched a bamboo-handled Gucci bag in Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy,” has long relied on Hollywood’s glamour icons to sell its pricey wares. And so there’s something fitting, even respectful, about the sheer number of movie stars that have been pressed into service here. Throwing subtlety to the wind with wild gesticulations and exaggerated Italian accents, they may flirt with and sometimes tumble headlong into stereotype, but they do so with a verve and commitment that, for the better part of 2½ hours, disarms judgment and suspends disbelief.

One man smokes, another talks and three people sit on a sofa in the movie "House of Gucci."

Were any of these characters really this awful or this riveting? Did any of it actually happen this way? Possibly. More or less. Of course not. As in any slick bio-fiction, characters have been excised, timelines fudged, perspectives distorted. And yet, even amid the inevitable simplifications and exaggerations, it all coheres, with a kind of implacably grim logic, into an extended cautionary tale about how family and business shouldn’t mix. That lesson is hastened by various outsiders and opportunists, including formidable Gucci lawyer Domenico De Sole (a chillingly poker-faced Jack Huston), maverick Texas designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) and the private equity firm Investcorp, all of which will do their part to separate the family from the company that bears its name.

“House of Gucci” will surely do its part to burnish the brand, even as it gleefully airs two decades’ worth of dirty (but still utterly fabulous) laundry. But Scott, now 83 and an ever more clear-eyed, dispassionate observer of how power and industry operate behind closed doors, doesn’t go out of his way to fetishize the inventory. He and his director of photography, Dariusz Wolski, shoot the Gucci family’s executive suites and luxe residences in muted grays, lending an often-sepulchral cast to the shadowy interiors and the actors’ faces. And they are no more intoxicated by the sight of double-G belts and Horsebit loafers than they were by the barrels of cocaine rolling through “The Counselor,” Scott’s brilliant 2013 thriller about a lawyer’s disastrous swerve into the Mexican drug trade.

Although it too focuses on an outsider who makes the mistake of fancying themself an insider, “House of Gucci” doesn’t have that earlier movie’s blistering nihilism. It’s a fashion show, figuratively and often literally, and its cutthroat dynamics are lightened with heavy dollops of foam and froth. If anything, its utter fascination with its characters, its refusal to condemn even the most irredeemable of them, gestures toward its most significant and obvious cinematic influence, “The Godfather.” There’s Leto’s dead-on channeling of Fredo Corleone; there’s also Pacino and, just as important, Driver’s eerie channeling of Pacino in the movie’s subtlest performance. You may think of Michael Corleone as Maurizio transforms from a quietly principled Gucci agnostic into the fortune-squandering head of the whole empire, his star rising even as his marriage goes spectacularly south.

But that’s more or less where the comparisons end. There is, for one, no “Godfather” equivalent of Patrizia Reggiani, and no one in “House of Gucci” who can ultimately contend with the force of nature that is Lady Gaga. In a movie that delights in its own counterfeit charms, she is very much the real deal.

‘House of Gucci’

Rated: R, for language, some sexual content and brief nudity and violence Running time: 2 hours, 38 minutes Playing: Starts Nov. 24 in general release

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‘House of Gucci’ Review: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver Rule in Ridley Scott’s Transfixing Fashion Tabloid ‘Godfather’

It's full of luscious backstabbing, but it's not camp. It's an icepick drama about the ways of power.

By Owen Gleiberman

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Lady Gaga stars as Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’sHOUSE OF GUCCIA Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures filmPhoto credit: Courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Inc© 2021 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“ House of Gucci ” has a transfixing backstabbing allure. It may be a drama about a crazy rich Euro chic Old World fashion dynasty, with a cast dominated by American actors scheming and emoting in gaudy Italian accents, but that doesn’t mean it’s some operatic piece of high camp. Based on the trailer, a lot of people apparently thought that’s just what it was going to be, yet trailers can be deceiving. There are moments in “House of Gucci” that will make your jaw drop (which, of course, is one of the best things that can happen at the movies), and moments you’ll laugh at the sheer audacity of what you’re seeing, but just because the characters in a drama behave in an over-the-top shameless manner doesn’t mean that the film that’s observing them is over-the-top. “House of Gucci” is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.

Directed by Ridley Scott , in what is easily his finest work since “Gladiator,” the film is absorbing because it takes the world it shows us on its own coldly flamboyant terms. “House of Gucci” is modeled fairly directly on “The Godfather,” and as soon as you say that it can sound like you’re making some ridiculous undue claim for it. I’m not saying that it’s in that league as a movie. (What is?) But the greatness of “The Godfather” was, in part, the way it navigated the hidden shoals of power, and “House of Gucci,” which is a kind of fashionista Godfather Lite, is a sophisticated true-life tale about the way that power actually works: in a business empire, in a family, among people who are supposed to be looking out for each other. That may be the stuff of soap opera (and “The Godfather,” as a novel, had links to the meaty potboilers of Harold Robbins), but when it’s done this well soap opera becomes intoxicating human drama.

It’s 1978, and Patrizia Reggiani ( Lady Gaga ), a middle-class social climber who works for her father’s trucking company in Milan, struts through the parking lot with butt-twitching gusto as the truck-crew members wolf whistle at her. Patrizia, in what the film presents as a very Italian way, knows what she’s got and how to use it. At a disco party in an aristocrat’s mansion, she meets Maurizio Gucci ( Adam Driver ), a sweet and rather gawky fellow in oversize glasses, and against the throb of Donna Summer she perks up when she hears his name. He’s a law student, the scion of the Gucci fashion empire (but, at this point, completely uninterested in the family business), and from the way she pursues him, stalking him to a library to create a “chance” meeting (which it never occurs to him is less than chance), we might surmise that she’s a vintage gold-digger.

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Maybe so, but Lady Gaga imbues her with a doleful sincerity. Gaga’s face is avid and open, with a fervor that volts through her eyes; she has a born actress’s gift for letting you read her emotions while holding a nugget of mystery in check. As Gaga plays Patrizia, she acts out how it’s possible to set your sights on someone wealthy and fall in love with him. Their courtship has a lusty imploring affection.

Then Maurizio introduces Patrizia to his father, the elegant and formidable Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), once a minor screen actor, now a vampirish tycoon with Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” hanging on the wall of his parlor. He’s the lordly co-owner and patriarch of the Gucci brand; he can’t conceive that his only son would wed someone who is this beneath him. Maurizio, however, wins the audience’s admiration for standing by his romantic convictions. He marries Patrizia (to the tune of George Michael’s “Faith”), even as his father cuts him out of the family fortune.

Scott, working from a shrewdly layered script by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (it’s based on Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book “The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed”), directs with a tone of deadpan puckish gravitas. Spanking the action along with Italian pop songs and snippets of opera, he stages each scene in an impeccable, neoclassical head-on way that has no ironic distance yet creates space for the suck-in-your-breath comedy of scandalous behavior.

As Patrizia and Maurizio, with their nearly rhyming names, settle into their modest life and give birth to a daughter, the film introduces the other members of the Gucci clan. There is Aldo, Rodolfo’s brother and the co-owner of the company; he’s played by Al Pacino with a twinkly rasp and a shrug of real-world materialism that makes him instantly likable. Aldo and Rodolfo have a détente relationship. Both feed off the company that has made their family wealthy (and was started by their father in Tuscany, where they still cultivate the cows that produce the magic Gucci leather), but Rodolfo is the artistic purist, lost in the past, where Aldo is always seeking ways to commercialize and maybe vulgarize the brand, like launching a Gucci outlet in a Japanese mall at the foot of Mount Fuji.

Then there’s Aldo’s son, Paolo, a frustrated designer who dresses in things like lavender corduroy suits. He thinks he’s got talent and does not, and Jared Leto , bald with a fringe of long hair, unrecognizable except for his flashing eyes, not so much speaking his lines as singing them, gives a delectable performance as this opera buffa wimp — the Fredo of the clan, theatrically crestfallen in his loser’s earnestness, with his insanely dorky disco moves, a flyweight Gucci who still, beneath it all, has the Gucci ego.

When Patrizia connects with Aldo at his 70th birthday party, she instantly sees that her “darling” uncle can be a way back into the Gucci family. She charms him, and he gifts her with a pair of Concorde tickets to New York. He’s inviting Patrizia and Maurizio to join the brand, and given that it’s Maurizio’s birthright, we think: Why not? Is there anything wrong with Patrizia wanting to share in that fortune? She glories in the perks — the free shopping sprees at the Gucci boutique in Manhattan, the company apartment. For a brief spell, she and Maurizio and Aldo seem like one big happy greedy family. But there are tensions, like a rift over the knockoff Gucci handbags you can buy on the street for $29.95. Patrizia thinks they damage the Gucci image; Aldo reveals that the Gucci company oversees them, because they’re profitable. (They’re the ’80s precursor to name designers sticking cheap versions of their labels in Target.)

As Patrizia, swilling martinis, grows more acquisitive, more stoked to assert control over the company, Lady Gaga narrows her features, letting a swarthy ferocity burn through them. We think we’re seeing the incendiary Lady Macbeth chapter of the Gucci saga, and in a way we are, as Patrizia twists the will of her husband around her little finger. But the beauty of Gaga’s performance is that she never lets us lose sight of the innocent small-time climber inside the schemer. Patrizia doesn’t know it, but she’s in over her hairspray-coiffed head. Hooking up with a television psychic named Pina (played with winsome cunning by Salma Hayek), who becomes her you-go-girl cheerleader and partner in crime, she figures out how to cut Aldo out of the picture, and she devises a truly devious way to seduce and abandon Paolo. All of which has a ruthlessness that makes the film feel like a companion piece to “Succession.” But here’s the grand trick of “House of Gucci”: The party is just getting started.

“House of Gucci” is like a “Godfather” that takes place long after Don Corleone (or anyone like him) has left the building. The aesthetic of the Gucci fashion empire — the heavy buckles and boxy leather, the dresses like form-fitting armor — is trapped in an older era; the family has no forward-thinking leader, no guiding moral center. But it does have a Michael Corleone: dear sweet Maurizio, who starts off as such a nice guy, and then gets pulled into his wife’s machinations, which baptize him in the ways of power. Adam Driver, in a superb performance, enacts the shifts in Maurizio with a supple chill. Maurizio wakes up and realizes that he resents what Patrizia is doing to his family; she’s tearing it apart. Yet in doing that very thing, which he went along with, she infuses a new ruthlessness into him. And he changes. He becomes…a Gucci.

You may ask: Who are we identifying with in “House of Gucci”? For a while it’s Patrizia; then it’s Maurizio. But this is a movie in which the driving force of our engagement is really the shifting spectacle of power. That, I suspect, is why some may find the movie wanting. If you’re looking for overripe kitschy malevolence, you won’t find it, and if you’re looking for a hero to connect to, you won’t totally find that either. But if you get onto the film’s wavelength, the pageant of dynastic corporate war is mesmerizing. This is a movie in which Maurizio gets cut out of the family, then rejoins it, only to see his wife take over, but she flies too close to the sun, so she has to get cut out too, at which point Maurizio thinks he’s king of the hill, but then, as he reinvents the company, hiring the unknown Texas designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) to bring it into the 21st century, the company gets cut out from under him . And Patrizia, incidentally, isn’t going away quietly. It’s a lethal game of musical chairs, in which the House of Gucci turns out to be a house of cards. But the more it implodes, the more you can’t look away.

Reviewed at Tribeca Screening Room, Nov. 5, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 157 MIN.

Production: A United Artists Releasing, Metro Goldwyn Mayer release, in association with BRON Creative, of a Scott Free production. Producers: Ridley Scott, Giannina Scott, Kevin J. Walsh, Mark Huffam. Executive producers: Kevin Ulrich, Megan Ellison, Aidan Elliott, Marco Valerio Pugini, Aaron L. Gilbert, Jason Cloth.
Crew: Director: Ridley Scott. Screenplay: Becky Johnston, Roberto Bentivegna. Camera: Dariusz Wolski. Editor: Claire Simpson. Music: Harry-Gregson Williams.
With: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jack Huston, Salma Hayek.

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House of Gucci (2021)

User Reviews
Other than the bare outlines, it's a story I knew nothing about, so it made for interesting viewing. And who doesn't want to see some escapist high-fashion, flashy cars and Italian high-living on the big screen?
Adam Driver delivers another stonking performance. He delivers the best of the accents on show and is a delight to watch whenever he's on screen. His performance is deliciously subtle and under-played. A model for acting lessons.
Al Pacino, in full-on Pacino mode, is also great as Maurizio's uncle: owner of the other half of the empire.
The accents! Where do I begin? I felt a desperate need mid-film to order a Cornetto and go compare my car insurance online. While Driver and Pacino tend to rein it in, most of the rest of the cast assume accents approaching a bad parody of Italians. Jared Leto and Gaga are particularly guilty.
I appreciate that the part of the "idiot" Paolo Gucci was meant to be comedic, but Jared Leto seems to almost be in a different film entirely. There's 'over-the-top' and 'waaaaay over-the-top'.
I've seen some other reviews praising Lady Gaga... saying that it proves her performance in "A Star is Born" wasn't just a "flash in the pan". Personally, I didn't feel it. I appreciate that the character of Patrizia is a larger-than-life one. But, although she did have some impressive scenes, for most of her performance I felt like she was obviously acting, and sometimes over-acting. The accent didn't help.
The film has a banging set of tunes, no argument. But for a sprawling drama told over a few decades (the film is nearly 160 minutes long!), music should be used to anchor the movie as to which year you are currently in. Donna Summer "I Feel Love": so it must be 1977. But the movie doesn't consistently follow that rule. It's the early 70's, but suddenly George Michael's "Faith" blares out. #Unsettling.
This may be my lack of concentration, but there seems to be an assertion in the film (presumably completely false) that Aldo Gucci was supporting/producing knockoff Gucci products for the mass-market: a "lucrative product line" that was later canned by Maurizio. I was personally confused by this bit of the story.

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House of Gucci Isn’t a Good Movie, But It’s Definitely a Good Time

Some movies leave you wanting to talk about the quality of the acting, but with House of Gucci , it feels more appropriate to discuss the amount . Even spread over an exorbitant two hours and 37 minutes, Ridley Scott’s second film in two months has more acting by volume than any other theatrical release this year. Its most prolific source is Jared Leto, who’s been encased in latex to play Paolo Gucci, the corduroy-loving lesser scion who tries to launch his own Gucci fashion line. It’s the rare performer who manages to out-big Al Pacino, but in scene after scene, Leto makes the acting legend, cast as Paolo’s father, Aldo, look downright restrained in his choices and his interpretation of an Italian accent. Pacino will do things like tell Jeremy Irons, playing Aldo’s brother and Gucci co-owner Rodolfo, “You need to deal with your saaahn !” and it comes across as a totally normal line-reading compared to Leto’s later singsong declaration that “My father is 70, he’s no spring CHEEECKEN .” When the two are together onscreen, their indulgences actually block each other out in an effect that’s probably a lot like the technology behind noise-canceling headphones. It frees your gaze to wander over the settings they’re in, which are usually rife with the kind of high-end ugliness that only the very rich can achieve.

Gucci is a label built on a carefully concocted air of tasteful luxury, but House of Gucci is a movie that mostly understands itself to be high-end trash. No one onscreen has a better grasp of this than Lady Gaga, who plays Patrizia Reggiani, the hot-blooded upstart who marries into the family and starts Lady Macbeth-ing it up, only to end up arranging a hit on her ex-husband, Maurizio (Adam Driver), after their divorce expels her from under the aegis of the green and red. There’s a touch of Nomi Malone to Gaga’s performance, which is fueled by a barely disguised ravenousness, a desire to eat the world in one determined bite. Patrizia is voluptuously vulgar, with her wiggle dresses and ever-more-voluminous hair, the daughter of a trucking entrepreneur whose eyes all but bug out of her head when the shy law student she meets at a party turns out to be heir to a fashion empire. Her calculations are so visible to us, if not to Maurizio, who never stood a chance, that her character achieves a contrary sort of guilelessness. Patrizia is so open about what she wants that it feels unfair to refer to her actions as schemes, and her desire for Maurizio can’t be separated from her desire for the money and power he represents. Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.

It’s not always about her, unfortunately. The screenplay for House of Gucci , which was written by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, based on a book by Sara Gay Forden, has the shapeless sprawl of something with many juicy details but no center. It begins as Patrizia’s tale, with her delightful seduction-as-bulldozing of Maurizio. Driver, who’s scientifically never been hotter than he is as the bashful idealist, makes for a hilariously unconvincing overlooked bookworm who can’t believe someone would ask him out. Rodolfo, who assesses Patrizia with an arid accuracy (Irons looks like he’s undergoing a new form of mummification that involves being wrapped in cashmere), initially cuts Maurizio out of his will for marrying Patrizia, only to slowly relent due to Aldo’s influence. A class climber causing chaos in the mansions of Milanese fashion aristocracy is the stuff of a good story. So is a reluctant child of that aristocracy overcoming his distaste for the fallacies of class to become the most ruthless spendthrift of them all. So is the balancing act of a luxury label trying to sell exclusivity while actually only making money off affordable accessories. But House of Gucci tries to be all of these movies without committing to any one perspective, never able to decide what it’s really about.

What it’s really about, of course, is rich people being awful to one another, a genre of entertainment that speaks to our era more than superheroes do. We may want to eat the rich, but we also like to watch them, and our appetite for dramas set in the world of the one percent hasn’t decreased, even as the use of guillotine GIFs rises. An unfortunate fact about the wealthy is that they get to puppet the world while also owning a lot of pretty things, qualities that have traditionally played very well onscreen. Shows like Succession and movies like House of Gucci try to square these contradictions by providing a kind of escapist schadenfreude, giving their audiences a chance to peer into the existences of the unfathomably well-off while also reassuring them that to actually be one of the superrich is to be miserable. The constant machinations and heartless power struggles are fun to watch, but also serve as a kind of moral prophylactic, a way of investing in the competitions onscreen without being in danger of investing in the characters.

Maybe that’s why Gaga’s character fades from view for a while, as though the movie loses its resolve, unable to bridge the endearing outsider and the murderess. But she represents the most interesting, if half-explored, idea that House of Gucci has to offer, because once she’s allowed into the hallowed halls of the Gucci clan, she buys into the myths of exclusivity and aristocracy more than Maurizio — who scoffs about his grandfather being a bellhop — ever did. Incensed to discover fakes being sold on the sidewalks of New York, she’s told that “quality is for the rich,” but that it’s a good thing that everyone wants to own a bit of Gucci anyway, even if it’s a knockoff. It’s the kind of cannily observed moment that makes the promise of House of Gucci so much more tantalizing than the actual movie itself. It opts for fun over quality, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have had both.

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“House of Gucci,” Reviewed: Lady Gaga Steals a Style-Challenged Yarn of the Fashion World

By Richard Brody

Adam Driver and Lady Gaga sit on a couch in formal attire while Al Pacino stands to their right and speaks to them with...

Start with the accents. Ridley Scott’s new movie, “House of Gucci,” is about one of Italy’s most notable and notorious fashion families, but it is an English-language movie starring an extraordinary cast of American and British actors— Adam Driver , Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto, and Jack Huston—who speak in heavily Italian-accented English. This decision renders the movie ridiculous from the start, like a Monty Python parody of the fashion world. It serves no dramatic purpose whatsoever, but it does serve a significant commercial and industrial one: it turns the acting into stunt acting, exposing the exceptional exertion required of the performers in navigating the dialogue’s game of phonic hopscotch. It’s a verbal variety of Oscar bait, an elocutionary version of wrestling the bear , the effortful stunt business that won Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar for “The Revenant.” The trickery may attract awards, but it does the actors of “House of Gucci” no favors.

The added verbal obstacles are all the more regrettable because the film’s script, written by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, is packed with sharp repartee that reverberates fascinatingly far beyond the confines of the characters’ specific troubles. Yet Scott focusses with narrow-minded obstinacy on the troubles at hand, and the movie that results feels like a true-crime TV miniseries sliced and diced to feature length. Jack Webb couldn’t have done a more rigorous job of filtering for “ just the facts ” than Scott has done, at the expense of any societal and historical resonance that the drama packs and any psychological depth that the characters possess.

The story is centered on the aloof scion of the Gucci clan, Maurizio (Driver), who, in 1978, is a cheerful, serious, carefree law student in Milan, studious, reserved, elegant, relaxed, zipping around town on a bicycle, a clip around the ankles of his well-tailored trousers. Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) is the office manager at her father’s Milan trucking company, where she shows up in tight dresses and high heels and endures the catcalls of the truckers hanging around the yard. Ill at ease at a friend’s disco party, Maurizio lingers alone behind an isolated bar; he and Patrizia meet cute when she asks him for a drink and he has to admit that he’s not the bartender. Patrizia asks him to dance, he demurs, she undoes his tie and loosens him up. Then, knowing she’d never see him again otherwise, she takes a seat at a café near his school library, pretends to be a law student, then gives him her phone number—by writing it in lipstick on the windshield of his scooter. It’s the air-kiss of death.

I haven’t yet seen Joel Coen’s forthcoming “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” but I will be surprised if Frances McDormand, for all the force of her artistry, feeds Lady Macbeth’s ambition with the same carnal energy that Lady Gaga brings to the remarkably similar role of Patrizia. As with Shakespeare’s play, everyone knows how the drama of Patrizia and Maurizio comes out: it’s as well known that she paid hit men to kill him as it is that Birnam Wood ultimately came to Dunsinane.

Patrizia shakes up Maurizio’s life in an irresistible whirlwind of sex and fun. After he introduces his new girlfriend to his father, Rodolfo (Irons), the older man makes the cardinal mistake of the disapproving parent: he not only expresses his disapproval (voicing his suspicion that Patrizia is a gold-digger and her father a mafioso) but threatens to cut Maurizio off, and in so doing forces the young man’s hand. Maurizio proposes to Patrizia, moves in with her parents, and takes a job at the family trucking firm, where he wears a uniform and makes friends with other working men. After the wedding—with the Gucci side of the church empty—Maurizio imparts to Patrizia his skepticism about his own family business. For her, though, it’s the prize, and it quickly proves within reach. Rodolfo’s brother, Aldo (Pacino), who owns the other fifty per cent of the business, considers his own son, Paolo (Leto)—an aspiring designer—to be a tasteless idiot, and he wants to lure Maurizio into the business. When he does so (with Patrizia as his persuasive proxy), she grabs hold of it with both hands: as a member of the family with a place at the table in meetings, and as the wife of a still-diffident potentate whom she has wrapped around her finger. But catastrophe follows quickly. Maurizio’s role in the company comes at a high emotional and moral price, and, when he tires of paying that price, he becomes disillusioned with Patrizia and seeks a divorce, inspiring her to exact the ultimate revenge.

Throughout “House of Gucci,” certain themes of underlying power and overarching breadth threaten to break through to the action and bring some substance to the movie—namely, the uneasy connection of family businesses and of capitalism, the inefficiency that inheres in inherited power, the inevitable and painful transition from dynasties to partnerships and publicly traded companies. These subjects are at least glancingly touched on in several sharply written scenes of fascinating boardroom maneuvers, but they remain isolated: Scott treats the Gucci saga as a mere yarn (albeit a ripping one), the cinematic equivalent of a series of jovially recounted barstool anecdotes that void the story’s social implications and haunting psychology. Patrizia is a Lady Macbeth without depth—without a sense of the deep twistedness that her ruthless behavior suggests, without any hint of the violence in her character. She has nerve and flashes of wit, but her relationship with Maurizio is a blank, the substance of their life together kept rigorously offscreen. It’s a key plot point that Patrizia calls in to a TV clairvoyant, Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek), who becomes her confidant and co-conspirator. The women’s connection suggests the class differences between Patrizia and Maurizio, but those differences go completely unexplored, asserted only when they conveniently push the action along.

The movie’s essential hollowness is all the more dismaying for its absurdly glorious moments of pop-iconic grandeur—most of them sharpened by Gaga’s screen-commanding gestures. Scott revels in such melodramatic touches as Patrizia holding up her hand with a spring-loaded intensity to flaunt her wedding ring, and—in a sublime bit of chutzpah—striding with the air of a conqueror into the family home after the murder is carried out. “House of Gucci” is Gaga’s movie, and she tears into it with an exuberant yet precise ferocity. She is the main reason why the movie at times transcends the limits of its scripted action. Her performance is an unusual one, all forceful gesticulations and high-relief inflections; she’s not expressively complex in repose except through the flaming power of her furiously fixed gaze, which is the movie’s dominant visual trope. Given her lack of extensive theatre training, though, the accent shtick leaves her at an inherent disadvantage beside her co-stars. She sounds somewhat like Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” I can’t get out of my head Patrizia’s response to Rodolfo when he asks about her interests: I’m a “pipple pleaser,” she says.

Driver is the onscreen M.V.P. of the past decade in movies, and he copes gamely with the constraint; it’s the writing in “House of Gucci” that lets him down. There’s not enough doubt or equivocation in Maurizio’s transformation to support the quizzical intellectual distraction that Driver brings to the character. He gets one good gesture in—a gleeful solitary leap over a sofa in his splashy new Manhattan office, a moment of “it’s good to be the king” that, rather than inaugurating his new reign of inner conflicts, waves them away. (Scott offers one fine touch for Maurizio, though it’s not a moment of performance but of design—a glimpse of his family-brand loafers that he wears while riding his scooter and trying to get past Swiss border controls.) There are other such moments, too, mainly involving Pacino, the one actor in the bunch who seems hardly inhibited by the compulsory accent stunt. Pacino brings to Aldo the grandeur that comes with fortune and power, and also the sardonic humor that’s the actor’s natural trait. He adds shiny flourishes even to such casual sequences as a telephone call inviting Rodolfo to his birthday party. Scott strains after such touches of flashiness (call them melodramatic bling), as if dousing the entire production in an element of sensation will compensate for merely functional storytelling serving in lieu of characters or ideas.

Though “House of Gucci” is centered on the world of fashion, it above all displays an appalling lack of style. Neither the craft of making clothing and leather goods nor the delight in handling them nor the transfixing delight in merely looking at them are allowed to knock the storytelling off its relentless, single-minded, crowd-pleasing pace. Plenty of fashion objects are seen in the course of the movie; none is lingered over, and the lack of contemplation is apparent visually no less than dramatically. With its indifference to the physical stuff of its subject, the thematic implications of its story, and the psychological twists of its characters, “House of Gucci,” in its briskly efficient professionalism, is the very exemplar of one-size-fits-all dramaturgy, of off-the-rack cinematic style, of directorial hack work.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the film’s screenwriters.

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House of gucci, common sense media reviewers.

Gaga + vintage glam = fab fun; smoking, swearing, sex.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Themes of love and family are countered by repeate

While each character has admirable moments, they a

Assassination with a shooting death. A man handles

Married couple has passionate sex. A man's backsid

Strong language includes "bastards," "bitch," "but

Gucci name/label is the heart of this story. Throu

Smoking and drinking throughout.

Positive Messages

Themes of love and family are countered by repeated demonstrations of greed, power, betrayal.

Positive Role Models

While each character has admirable moments, they all make decisions or take actions that prevent them from being good role models.

Violence & Scariness

Assassination with a shooting death. A man handles his wife aggressively. Cruel insults.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Married couple has passionate sex. A man's backside is completely exposed. Patrizia dresses in low-cut blouses and tight skirts. Bubble and mud baths barely cover breasts. Women seen in only bras and underwear, including a glimpse of a model in a see-through bra.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "bastards," "bitch," "butthole," "s--t," and several uses of "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Gucci name/label is the heart of this story. Through the eyes of a working-class character, viewers see her delight in coming into wealth and having expensive clothes, estates, cars, trips. The story is about the trap of greed, but the takeaway is still "more is more."

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that director Ridley Scott 's House of Gucci is a glamorous examination of greed. A real-life murder looms over the story: In 1998, Patrizia Reggiani ( Lady Gaga ) was convicted of planning the assassination of her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci ( Adam Driver ), the former head of the Gucci fashion house. The film plays out like a real-world Dynasty ; it's full of sex, betrayal, wealth, and all the excess of the 1980s. And while the film doesn't condone her actions, Patrizia is the main character, and her portrayal isn't unsympathetic. The clothes, the cars, the estates, the Italian locations, the makeup, the music -- everything here is dripping in style, and young viewers will eat it up. But that glamour extends to the way smoking is depicted: With every puff of a cigarette, you can practically hear the crackle of the burning tip and a silky whoosh with the exhale. There's also drinking throughout and strong, cruel language ("bitch," "f--k," etc.). Married characters have passionate sex, and there's partial nudity, including a man's bare bottom. Teens may well adore the haute couture aesthetic, the epic put-downs, and Gaga's hypnotic performance, but with the movie's two-and-a-half-hour running time, they may get antsy before its stunning conclusion. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 7 parent reviews

I sexual scene that can be avoided, overall amazing movie with incredible acting and connection to actors

Flashy fashion fun but not for kids, what's the story.

In HOUSE OF GUCCI, Maurizio Gucci ( Adam Driver ) marries Patrizia Reggiani ( Lady Gaga ) over the protests of his father, Rodolpho ( Jeremy Irons ). As the couple builds a life together, Patrizia inserts herself into the family's fashion business, pushing out the Guccis by any means possible. The movie is adapted from Sara Gay Forden's 2001 nonfiction book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed.

Is It Any Good?

With this juicy, delicious drama, director Ridley Scott proves it's always in fashion to expose the ugliness in beautiful things. The Gucci story is a take on the Cinderella fairy tale: The handsome heir in a family of wealth, power, and influence defies his father to marry a loving but low-status girl. The story is told through the perspective of that girl, Patrizia, which helps viewers appreciate what it would be like to wake up one morning and have it all: a loving family, an exciting social calendar, a life ensconced in jaw-dropping luxury. It's gleefully fun, but there's no happily ever after. Gaga demonstrates again that's she's a mesmerizing acting phenom. As Patrizia, she's adorable, sexy, smart, and almost uncomfortably relatable. Driver balances her larger-than-life presence with an understated performance, allowing viewers to understand why reserved and socially awkward Maurizio is drawn to her. Patrizia is big, bold, and manipulative; Maurizio is quiet and intellectual and compartmentalizes his emotions. Scott deftly exposes that these two personality types were a toxic combination: It was inevitable that their romantic sparks would grow into a five-alarm fire, burning everything to the ground.

Nearly all of the actors in House of Gucci are American, putting on Italian accents -- Gaga and Driver pretty believably, but virtually unrecognizable co-star Jared Leto is more ridiculous. As Paolo Gucci, he's a caricature so off the wall that it sucks you out of the film. But he's also the comic relief and is likely to keep teen viewers engaged. And the dialogue crackles with quotable lines, particularly insults. All of that said, the revelry, excess, and sizzling slams only go so far; listening to men in suits talk shop is enough to make anyone's mind wander, and at two hours and 38 minutes, we feel the drag. And then it's like Scott picks up on our boredom and applies the gas to get to the shocking conclusion, rushing crucial character development. House of Gucci is enthralling when we're immersed in a moving, breathing issue of Vogue , but we needed it to end like Psychology Today ; instead, we're tossed the dog-eared pages of a National Enquirer .

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the appeal of stories about the rich and famous. What makes them interesting? Why are we intrigued by the downfall of people like this?

Who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist in House of Gucci ? Is Patrizia's experience relatable? Why do you think the filmmakers chose to show that her business instincts were right, considering that her actions were wrong?

How are drinking and smoking depicted here? Are they glamorized ? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 24, 2021
On DVD or streaming : February 22, 2022
Cast : Lady Gaga , Adam Driver , Salma Hayek , Al Pacino , Jared Leto
Director : Ridley Scott
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Bisexual actors, Latino actors, Middle Eastern/North African actors
Studio : MGM
Genre : Drama
Topics : Brothers and Sisters , History
Run time : 157 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence
Last updated : August 29, 2023

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House of Gucci review: Ridley Scott's starry melodrama is both too much and not enough

It's Goooochi, darling.

Coco Chanel once famously said to look in the mirror before leaving the house and take one thing off. But Gucci is not Chanel, and Ridley Scott is not a man built for minimalism: His House does pretty much everything to the max, a chaotic bellissimo romp of a movie so stuffed with oversized characters and telenovela twists that it feels less like a biopic than a duty-free Dynasty .

At 157 minutes, it could also nearly be a miniseries, which actually might have served the amount of outrageous real-life narrative screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna are attempting to cram in. The center and the springboard, though, is the romance between Maurizio Gucci ( Adam Driver ) and Patrizia Reggiani ( Lady Gaga ). She's a tiny firecracker, a pocket Venus in a wiggle skirt with dreams that reach a lot higher than the reception desk of her father's trucking company. He's tall and rangy, an absent-minded scion who would rather study law than take his own expected place in the family business.

When they meet at a Milan nightclub in 1978, Maurizio thinks she looks like Liz Taylor; she thinks he looks like a millionaire. He's too shy and socially awkward to make a real move but she's no dummy: With some legwork and a little light stalking, she can make fate align for a first date. It doesn't take long until he's smitten with her sense of freedom and the lipstick kisses she leaves on his Vespa, even when his disapproving father ( Jeremy Irons , sepulchral in a series of silk dressing gowns) sniffily cuts him off.

For a minute the pair get to play at keeping house like ordinary married people, but there's a power vacuum at Gucci that its current head, Maurizio's beloved uncle Aldo (an avuncular Al Pacino ), can't fill alone — and certainly not with his own son, the rotund, faintly ridiculous Paolo. (That's Jared Leto under all those bald caps and prosthetics, though hiring Jeffrey Tambor seems like it might have been an easier shortcut.) Soon enough Maurizio is back in the mix, with Patrizia as his loyal consigliere and Lady Macbeth. But when her ambitions for the company outstrip her husband's patience with "outsiders" — and his attentions stray to an old friend ( Stillwater 's Camille Cottin) more suited to his class — a more permanent plan B begins to fall into place.

Gucci is Scott's second movie this year after the underappreciated Last Duel , and at 83, his sense of melodrama and florid showmanship is largely undiminished; the story on screen, with its vast palazzos, headline scandals, and Swiss bank accounts, feels like one of those old Vanity Fair articles about rich-people depravity come to life. In that sense, it has more in common with 2017's All the Money in the World than any of his Gladiators or American Gangsters . Which is not to say that Gaga doesn't come in full battle dress: Beneath the Ferrari-red snowsuits and wild wiggery, she vibrates with an intensity that often supersedes the sillier bits, every hand clap and espresso-cup tap another brick in a highly GIF-able whole.

It's clear she's playing for her life, though it's less obvious whether she's in the same movie as her costars: Leto's clownish Paolo seems to be in some kind of tragic comedy; the storyline for Salma Hayek , as the late-night TV psychic Patrizia increasingly leans on, is pure farce. And Driver, maybe for the first time, is the coolest cucumber in the room, a distracted aristocrat who retreats behind his name and his nice things whenever things get too ugly or difficult. (That they're all speaking in a lumpy risotto of accents that range from La Dolce Vita to lost Mario brother certainly doesn't help, though it's also hard at this point to imagine the film without them.)

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promised. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true. Grade: B

House Of Gucci Review

26 Nov 2021

House Of Gucci

It’s probably the moment when Lady Gaga and Salma Hayek are having a mud-bath together and talking about casting spells that you realise House Of Gucci never had any designs on normality. Gaga is Patrizia Reggiani, the wronged woman who has turned the fashion world on its head. Hayek is Pina Auriemma, a clairvoyant who somehow becomes embroiled with it all after Patrizia phones in to her call-in television show. Just because. It’s a bizarre sub-strand of a film away with the fairies from the start.

It’s based on Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book The House Of Gucci: A Sensational Story Of Murder, Madness, Glamour, And Greed , which is exactly what Ridley Scott ’s adaptation is. And it is not interested in subtlety. Everything that happens is out-sized, and pretty much every performance is huge: other than Jack Huston who, almost jarringly naturalistic as businessman Domenico De Sole, didn’t get the memo, and Adam Driver , whose Maurizio is for the most part unassuming, the acting here is, well, loud. Gaga, never not compelling, consistently chews the scenery like a fabulous piranha. Al Pacino , handing out pomp like there’s no tomorrow as company chairman Aldo Gucci, is like an ageing Scarface, while Jared Leto… well. Where to begin with Jared Leto ?

In House Of Gucci , Jared Leto looks like he’s wandered over from Gotham City. In fact he looks a little like Batman Returns ’ Oswald Cobblepot, and his performance isn’t entirely dissimilar. Ditching his own immortal beauty for prosthetics that present him as bald, portly designer Paolo Gucci, he sings every line. No potential intonation is left unturned as he makes love to vowels, goes to town with consonants. It's possible that no actor has ever had as much fun with a role as he does here. Is he great, or just ridiculous? The answer, of course, is yes. Both. You’d happily pay to see him do a one-man show on Broadway with this shtick. Whatever the hell it is.

Everything that happens is out-sized, and pretty much every performance is huge.

And that sums up the film itself. The whole thing wants to be Sharon Stone ’s character in Casino , and it is, and it isn’t. Despite the story’s operatic sweep, despite its undeniably Shakespearean entanglements, it feels oddly undramatic, the filmmaking itself quite detached. And certainly, despite all the catastrophe, you won’t be shedding tears over anybody, but maybe that’s the point? It’s a case-study of a business gone amok, and while you don’t truly get to know any of these people as actual human beings, you probably wouldn’t want to.

But that’s by the by when there’s so much madness to behold. There are lines here for the ages (very much relished by those delivering them). “Never confuse shit with chocolate.” Or how about, “A dinosaur posing as a butthole.” Perhaps best of all: “It’s a memory wrapped in Lycra.” You have to hand it to Ridley Scott, still, at 83, making utterly unique films that, for whatever reason, demand your attention. And Jared Leto will haunt your dreams.

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Screen Rant

House of gucci review: lady gaga steals the show in underwhelming melodrama.

House of Gucci boasts strong performances and is hammy enough to be occasionally enjoyable, but falls flat in the overall effectiveness of its story.

It’s been over 26 years since the murder of Maurizio Gucci, who once ran his family’s famous fashion business. The crime made headlines and rocked the fashion industry. House of Gucci not only revisits that moment, but ventures back two decades to build up the relationships, the conflict, and the events leading up to his death. Directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna — who draw from the book, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed , by Sara Gay Forden — House of Gucci boasts strong performances and is hammy enough to be occasionally enjoyable, but falls flat in the overall effectiveness of its story.

House of Gucci follows Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), the daughter of a truck business owner who is responsible for the accounts and is celebrated by her father for being able to forge signatures. Patrizia meets Maurizio (Adam Driver) at a party and they get married soon after, a decision that angers his father Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons). Maurizio is content with working in ground transportation, but Patrizia knows the power of the name Gucci and works to bring Maurizio back into the good graces of Rodolfo — namely, by establishing a good rapport with his uncle, Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) and, to a lesser extent, Aldo’s outsider son Paolo (Jared Leto). Intent on making Maurizio a big name within his family’s company, something which he certainly leans into, the pair work on their rise to the top, with grave consequences.

Related: Lady Gaga Improvised Iconic Father, Son, & House Of Gucci Line

Lady Gaga's performance as Patrizia is by far one of the best things about House of Gucci , ridiculous enough without going over the top. She really commits to an Italian accent more than most and, when the time calls for it, her portrayal can be simultaneously devastating and funny. However, one of the biggest letdowns of the film is how little is understood about her overall perspective. The screenplay could have used a lot more polishing with regards to what drives Patrizia besides money and power. Questions of how she truly feels about the Guccis, Maurizio, and her life at large always bubble to the surface, but House of Gucci doesn't linger long enough to ponder or explore her interiority beyond the choices she makes to drive a wedge between the family.

By the time Maurizio leaves her and she tries to come back into his life, it's unclear if she ever loved him at all or if Patrizia was only ever drawn to the legacy of Gucci. House of Gucci makes sure to leave Patrizia feeling like an outsider; every time she tries to put her foot through the door she is pushed out by a comment made by a family member, including Rodolfo’s lawyer Domenico De Sole (Jack Huston), or an action committed that maintains a barrier between her and the rest of her husband's family. But the film doesn’t capitalize on this often enough, which leaves the buildup toward Maurizio's demise — and the tension the story needed as everything falls apart — somewhat restrained.

While Scott’s film never pokes fun at the characters or the seriousness with which they take their business’ inner workings and family affairs, House of Gucci wastes an opportunity to be a lot more fun than it is. The costumes (designed by Janty Yates) are impeccable, giving the story and characters a boost of drama and an air of self-importance that permeates every moment throughout the film. There's a lot of potential that goes untapped, however, with the film's emotional beats lacking effectiveness, turmoil, and general panache. Even Maurizio's murder ultimately falls flat in the way it’s handled.

At over two hours and a half, House of Gucci’s pacing leaves certain aspects of the story in need of tighter writing. The actors definitely seem to be having a lot of fun with the material, though, with Jared Leto’s performance managing to land a few laughs and Al Pacino fully embracing the zeal of Aldo's persona. To that end, the film certainly reaches the heights of unadulterated soap opera drama and decadence; and yet, it still requires an energetic boost to stick the emotional, twisted landing. So while House of Gucci is melodramatic enough to be engaging and watchable, with the performances being a standout, a lot of the story needed to be ironed out and further explored for it to achieve anything beyond semi-serious superficiality.

Next: Lady Gaga & Adam Driver Improvised House of Gucci Sex Scene

House of Gucci releases in theaters November 24, 2021. The film is 157 minutes long and is rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence.

Key Release Dates

House of gucci.

clock This article was published more than 2 years ago

‘House of Gucci’ sounds like a movie that’s so bad it’s good. That’s only half right.

“House of Gucci” is a movie about passion, not fashion .

The soap-opera-like tale, which tells the true story of the 1995 murder of fashion heir Maurizio Gucci by thugs hired by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, is also — if you believe the trailer, which touts the following themes, in all caps — about money, family, power, betrayal, sex, loyalty, scandal, ambition and murder. Presumably, all that content explains why the film needs to be 2 hours 37 minutes long. By comparison, “ Dune ” — which is only a saga of the rise of a psychic space Messiah destined to lead a race of oppressed hallucinogenic-drug miners to freedom on a desert planet overrun by giant, industrial-machinery-eating sandworms — somehow manages to be two minutes shorter.

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The new film doesn’t even get to the divorce or the murder until after the two-hour mark, which is well beyond the point at which a lot of very fine movies have already rolled their closing credits. So what does “Gucci” do with all that precious time?

Not much, as it turns out.

Directed by Ridley Scott , it’s one of those prestige true-crime dramas that — unlike the director’s thematically similar, yet deliciously, darkly cynical “ All the Money in the World ,” about the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III — run through a checklist of events without ever seeming to draw any cautionary lesson or larger point.

None of which would be a problem, if “Gucci” were half as much fun as I’m about to make it sound. After all, who doesn’t love a good, tawdry scandal?

On paper, at least, the facts have the makings of make an entertaining, if campy yarn. Based on Sara Gay Forden’s 2000 nonfiction book , the film follows the relationship between wealthy Gucci scion Maurizio (Adam Driver), a nerdy law student who, as the film opens in 1978, seems to have little interest in pursuing the family business, and Patrizia (Lady Gaga), a woman of modest means who’s working for her father’s trucking company. “Mafia!,” snorts Maurizio’s father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) dismissively, before briefly disinheriting his son.

How ‘House of Gucci’ author Sara Gay Forden would spend a perfect day in D.C.

Patrizia comes across like a bit of a gold-digger. Her eyes light up at the name Gucci when she and Maurizio first meet, and then she seems to be stalking him. Once things turn sour, she seeks the advice of a TV psychic (Salma Hayek), who becomes an accessory to the film’s climactic crime.

The rest of the story concerns the ups and downs of their marriage, set against a backdrop of the Gucci empire’s business dealings: Charges of tax fraud are brought against Rodolfo’s brother Aldo (Al Pacino), instigated by his ne’er-do-well, would-be designer son Paolo (Jared Leto), against whom countercharges of copyright infringement are brought. “I don’t need anyone,” Paolo declaims, in one of several lines destined to find their way to a midnight quote-along screening of the film. “I’m Paolo — Paolo Gucci! And I’m going to start my own line.” This short speech is followed by a shot of Paolo urinating on a vintage, Gucci-logo scarf, designed by his Uncle Rodolfo.

At another point, the ambitious Patrizia says, with the menace — and heavy, vaguely Eastern European accent — of a Countess Dracula, “It’s time to take out the trash.”

Good stuff. Except, not really. (I’ll admit the costumes are kind of fabulous.)

Gucci’s moment: As the brand turns 100, creative director Alessandro Michele is leading the fashion industry toward a different future

Speaking of accents: The Italian-inflected English dialogue (by Becky Johnston and Robert Bentivegna) is all over the map. Pacino sounds like his character grew up in the Bronx section of Florence. Irons struggles to shake off the Old Vic. And Driver doesn’t really try much at all. Leto, for his part sounds (and even looks) a little like Mario of the video game. The actor is unrecognizable under a bald cap, mustache and bushy sideburns that look like a family of woolly bear caterpillars have colonized his head, a paunchy fat suit and pudgy facial prosthetics.

But wouldn’t it have been simpler to just cast someone who already looks like that?

Apologies for making any of this sound like “Gucci” could be one of those so-bad-it’s-good larks. For all its imperfections, the sin this movie is most guilty of is taking itself too seriously. As a colleague observed after a recent screening, the film would have been a lot more fun if Adam McKay had directed it.

“I need an espresso,” sighs Maurizio, encountering one of the plot’s parade of pointless headaches. So might you, dear reader, but I wouldn’t recommend consuming one before the movie. Not without a bathroom break.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language, some sex and brief nudity, violence and smoking. 157 minutes.

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Police officers in what look like biker helmets stand around the entrance to a subway station. Behind them, people are marching. One person holds a small Palestinian flag, and two hold up posters.

Review: ‘House of Gucci’ is a fashion catastrophe

Even a scene-stealing Gaga performance can’t save Ridley Scott’s true-crime slog from itself.

Ridley%E2%80%99s+Scott%E2%80%99s+new+film+%E2%80%9CHouse+of+Gucci%E2%80%9D+stars+Lady+Gaga+as+Patrizia+Reggiani+and+Adam+Driver+as+Maurizio+Gucci.+The+film+follows+the+rise+and+fall+of+the+Gucci+family+in+the+1980s.+%28Image+courtesy+of+Universal+Pictures%29

Ridley’s Scott’s new film “House of Gucci” stars Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani and Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci. The film follows the rise and fall of the Gucci family in the 1980s. (Image courtesy of Universal Pictures)

Isabella Armus , Deputy Arts Editor December 6, 2021

There was a palpable electricity in the air when I sat down to watch Ridley Scott’s directorial take on the infamous Gucci family murders. Maybe it was just the overpriced movie theater wine, but “House of Gucci” seemed like a film determined to become a sensation.

At least, that’s what was promised in the barrage of advertising. The trailers depicted a punchy tale of glamour, sex, fashion, pasta and, most importantly, murder. The lore of the Gucci dynasty became a buoyant trove, so easy to sell that it seemed predestined for success on the silver screen. Paired with a toupee-ed Adam Driver and the famously Italian Lady Gaga as the devious protagonists, “House of Gucci” had the perfect recipe for something diabolically magical.

Regretfully, premise and star power are the only achievements that “House of Gucci” can flex, as the film fails to follow through on the splashy camp potential that the project so ardently promised.

The narrative begins with a spark. We meet Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiani, a woman so enchanting that her mere strut can cause the local car garage to break out in mass hysteria. Sick of forging checks in her father’s office, Patrizia decides to paint the town red, and under the light of a disco ball, she meets the 6-foot ticket out of her ordinary life. His name? Gucci.

As soon as Reggiani recognizes the financial potential in Driver’s coy Maurizio Gucci at a swinging nightclub, she begins pursuing him with the same dedication as a middle school crush. She’s seductive, bubbly and persistent, cornering Gucci at every turn. He becomes a trust-funded stone slab who eventually falls, and Reggiani becomes the vixen who’s ready to mold him.

The beginning stages of this relationship provide the most kinetic sequences in the film. Those firey first months of rushed nuptials and over-the-top sex scenes operate as the perfect introduction to a duo whose fate is already tragically sealed. Driver provides the subtle Italian set dressing as Gaga scorches each scene with the raise of a charcoal eyebrow and a frivolous intensity that feels too specific to be fabricated.

It’s rare to witness a film that seems so disinterested in itself.

It’s Gaga’s stiletto-clad stomp that curdles the couple’s epic romance as Patrizia, now Patrizia Gucci, pressures Maurizio to rejoin his family’s legendary fashion house, which also, of course, brings her into the fold. Maurizio eventually picks up on the chilly business practices of his relatives and turns Patrizia’s woozy infatuation with his family’s fortune back onto her. With his newfound power, Maurizio neglects Patrizia and eventually has an affair, instigating their violent downfall.

Though these protagonists are rife with intrigue, “House of Gucci” asphyxiates these exciting qualities at every turn. It’s rare to witness a film that seems so disinterested in itself. The Gucci couture that drives these characters to murder is only referred to with flippant mentions and sketchbooks coated in gray. The fashion is reduced to a vague concept, obscuring the motivations of both Patrizia and the Gucci family.

This haziness continues as the narrative abstains from delving into any character interiority, trudging from scene to scene as if they’re required readings. We see the Gucci couple’s vacations, children and luxury apartments, but never the actual characters. The performances are reduced to mere pantomimes of interview clips and Wikipedia summaries as personal histories are almost intentionally underserved, making the dramatic crescendos falter in their believability.

The film doesn’t identify character traits for Patrizia’s tantrums to hinge around, so her eventual breakdown relies on the flat trope of a woman scorned by her lover — a trope so stale, you can nearly see the dust being brushed off it.

The film doesn’t even have an argument for so-bad-it’s-good appeal. Case in point: Jared Leto’s Italian accent.

Where to begin? While his sad-sack demeanor is actually what makes Paolo Gucci one of the film’s more sympathetic characters, Leto’s severely under-rehearsed performance causes friction in most of his scenes. Leto’s commitment here is so misdirected that he creates a whiny affectation evoking the Mario Brothers at best and Borat at worst. The attempted accent takes over every scene and remains just as heinous throughout the entire film, a feat so spectacular it is difficult to even laugh about.

This film mishandles its flamboyant potential in innumerable ways — far too many to catalog here. The directing is comatose throughout the two-hour-and-38-minute runtime and drags on without an ounce of charm. As the murder is conducted; the theater doesn’t react. Cold silence reverberates and the impact never lands.

Despite possessing every conceivable path to success, “House of Gucci” offers neither style nor substance. Its passionless devotion to the routine beats of the historical murder leave the rest of the film hollow in its premise and shallow in its hype.

Sorry, Gaga, but “House of Gucci” is the Olive Garden of cinema.

Adam Driver
gucci family
house of gucci

Isabella Armus is a senior majoring in cinema studies with a double minor in creative writing and anthropology. She loves trash TV, botching recipes, and...

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House of Gucci movie review & film summary (2021)
Unsurprisingly, visual design is how "House of Gucci" leaves its strongest impression. With a story set across Rome, Milan, New York and even the Alps—where Maurizio and Patrizia vacation, and an incredible Camille Cottin makes an appearance as Maurizio's romantic-interest-to-be—the movie highlights the luxury and lavishness of the ...
House of Gucci
Jul 26, 2023 Full Review Tina Kakadelis Beyond the Cinerama Dome House of Gucci fails to work on two levels. First, as a historical family drama, and second, as a campy, good time.
'House of Gucci' Review: Murder, Italian-Style
Nov. 23, 2021. House of Gucci. Directed by Ridley Scott. Crime, Drama, Thriller. R. 2h 37m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an ...
House of Gucci
Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 18, 2022. House of Gucci shifts through several tones as it spotlights the dark side of power, pleasure, and privilege, but it's anchored by an endlessly ...
House of Gucci review
Like Scott's 2017 Getty family drama All the Money in the World, House of Gucci does a solid job of evoking its recent-history milieu, boasting a beige and brown palette that reeks of nicotine ...
House of Gucci review
House of Gucci review - Lady Gaga murders in style in true-crime fashion house drama ... He is a pampered former movie-matinee idol who gave up showbiz to rejoin the family firm and now suspects ...
'House of Gucci' review: Lady Gaga coldly electrifies couture saga
The movie opens on March 27, 1995, mere minutes before Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), the fashion house's former head, is gunned down in Milan by an assassin hired by his vengeful ex-wife ...
House of Gucci (2021)
House of Gucci: Directed by Ridley Scott. With Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons. When Patrizia Reggiani, an outsider from humble beginnings, marries ...
'House of Gucci' Review
November 22, 2021 3:00pm. Lady Gaga in 'House of Gucci' Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. It pains me to say these words about anything, but House of Gucci is begging to be a Ryan ...
'House of Gucci' Review: A Transfixing Fashion Tabloid 'Godfather'
Screenplay: Becky Johnston, Roberto Bentivegna. Camera: Dariusz Wolski. Editor: Claire Simpson. Music: Harry-Gregson Williams. With: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons ...
House of Gucci (2021)
8/10. House of Gucci (2021) robfollower 24 November 2021. Gaga delivers a stellar performance as Patrizia, melodramatic, yet full of charisma, loaded with personality, undeniable magnetism, and total commitment to her character. "House of Gucci" is Gaga's movie, make no mistake, and she won't let you forget it.
House of Gucci
House of Gucci is inspired by the shocking true story of the family behind the Italian fashion empire. When Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), an outsider from humble beginnings, marries into the Gucci family, her unbridled ambition begins to unravel the family legacy and triggers a reckless spiral of betrayal, decadence, revenge, and ultimately…murder.
Movie Review: House of Gucci, Starring Lady Gaga
Movie review: Ridley Scott's House of Gucci is at its best when it centers Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani, the murderous socialite convicted of hiring someone to kill her ex-husband, Maurizio ...
'House of Gucci' review: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver star in a fact-based
"House of Gucci" takes a seemingly can't-miss combination of talent and material and produces what feels like the knockoff version of a really grand drama. Lady Gaga and Adam Driver bring ...
"House of Gucci," Reviewed: Lady Gaga Steals a Style-Challenged Yarn of
Ridley Scott's new movie, "House of Gucci," is about one of Italy's most notable and notorious fashion families, but it is an English-language movie starring an extraordinary cast of ...
House of Gucci Review
House of Gucci is a cautionary tale of power, money, greed, and murder that loses its way the longer it goes on and on and on. ... All Reviews Editor's Choice Game Reviews Movie Reviews TV Show ...
House of Gucci Movie Review
Parents need to know that director Ridley Scott's House of Gucci is a glamorous examination of greed. A real-life murder looms over the story: In 1998, Patrizia Reggiani was convicted of planning the assassination of her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), the former head of the Gucci fashion house.The film plays out like a real-world Dynasty; it's full of sex, betrayal, wealth, and all ...
House of Gucci review: Ridley Scott's starry melodrama is both too much
Gucci is Scott's second movie this year after the underappreciated Last Duel, and at 83, his sense of melodrama and florid showmanship is largely undiminished; the story on screen, with its vast ...
House Of Gucci
Release Date: 26 Nov 2021. Original Title: House Of Gucci. It's probably the moment when Lady Gaga and Salma Hayek are having a mud-bath together and talking about casting spells that you ...
House Of Gucci Review: Lady Gaga Steals The Show In Underwhelming Melodrama
Lady Gaga's performance as Patrizia is by far one of the best things about House of Gucci, ridiculous enough without going over the top. She really commits to an Italian accent more than most and, when the time calls for it, her portrayal can be simultaneously devastating and funny. However, one of the biggest letdowns of the film is how little ...
'House of Gucci' movie review: Lady Gaga and Adam Drive star in a
The soap-opera-like tale, which tells the true story of the 1995 murder of fashion heir Maurizio Gucci by thugs hired by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, is also — if you believe the trailer ...
House of Gucci
House of Gucci is a 2021 American biographical crime drama film directed by Ridley Scott, based on the 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden. The film follows Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), as their romance transforms into a fight for control of the Italian fashion brand Gucci.
Review: 'House of Gucci' is a fashion catastrophe
The trailers depicted a punchy tale of glamour, sex, fashion, pasta and, most importantly, murder. The lore of the Gucci dynasty became a buoyant trove, so easy to sell that it seemed predestined for success on the silver screen. Paired with a toupee-ed Adam Driver and the famously Italian Lady Gaga as the devious protagonists, "House of ...

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