The kindest thing I can say about “House of Gucci” — and also the cruelest — is that it should have been an Italian movie.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“House of Gucci,” Ridley Scott’s film on the dynasty behind the Gucci fashion house, arrives in theaters across the United States on Nov.
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.
There is potential here for camp, for glamour, for something louche and nasty and over-the-top.
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.
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.