House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, Al Pacino
I should have got used to people from other countries - even other planets - speaking American by now, but it stills strikes me as incongrous. In this one, the principals went to some trouble (but not enough) to acquire Italian accents. But that only makes it sillier. We're presumably meant to imagine that they're speaking Italian - their own language - so why aren't they speaking fluently?
The acting is all pretty bad. The Gaga person is apparently in some form of showbiz other than acting, but here she is - untrained - in a leading role, being inconsistently hysterical. Adam Driver has always looked to me like a robot - except that he doesn't have a flicker of intelligence. At least Al Pacino is at home in an Italian environment, but even he is uncontrolled by Scott's geriatric lack of direction. Jared Leto, however, so overtops him with excess that he is, as Richard Roeper writes below, in a film of his own. Jeremy Irons is too little too early.
The story, such as it is, is thin, and lacking in any kind of redemption. People do crime, do time, the end. It's the kind of thing you pay brief attention only because you're in the dentist's waiting room and it's the only magazine to read.
Wikipedia:
Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus reads, "House of Gucci vacillates between inspired camp and dour drama too often to pull off a confident runway strut, but Lady Gaga's note-perfect performance has a timeless style all its own." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 59 out of 100 based on 57 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it an 82% positive score, with 60% saying they would definitely recommend it. Deadline Hollywood noted a strong divide between critics and audiences and said, "it appears moviegoers are overpowering." Screen Rant commented that although the film received mixed reviews from critics, the performances of the cast were highly praised, with particular emphasis on Lady Gaga and Jared Leto.
Alissa Wilkinson of Vox gave the film a mixed review, praising the performances but criticizing the screenplay and writing: "The movie the trailer is selling is actually a little more dishy and wild than the real House of Gucci, which would be a pointless and somewhat perfunctory dud if it weren't for the brilliance, or madness, of the performances." Reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney wrote: "Ridley Scott's film is a trashtacular watch that I wouldn't have missed for the world. But it fails to settle on a consistent tone — overlong and undisciplined as it careens between high drama and opera buffa."
Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, writing: "Adam Driver (who has now played a French squire and an Italian fashion heir in consecutive Ridley Scott movies) and Lady Gaga have legit chemistry together, and it's still a kick to see Al Pacino roaring like a lion in winter. But Hayek and Irons are playing cardboard-thin characters, Leto flounders about as if he's in a movie all his own, and House of Gucci feels coldly calculating when it should have been flush and warm with scandalous sensationalism." Writing for The New York Times, A. O. Scott found the film to be a missed opportunity that could've been crafted more in line with better cinematic standards, stating that it lacks "the necessary vision or inspiration."
Gaga's Italian accent was met with criticism by Italian actress and dialect coach Francesca De Martini, who worked on set as a dialogue coach for Hayek, and claimed that Gaga's "accent is not exactly an Italian accent, it sounds more Russian." BBC stated that Leto's portrayal of Paolo Gucci inspired "both ridicule and irritation." Film critic Mark Kermode described his performance as "parodic", writing that "while others adopt faintly ridiculous Italian inflections, Leto delivers his lines in a string of high-pitched whoops that suggest he is attempting to communicate with whales." David Ehrlich of IndieWire described Leto as "brilliantly over-the-top".
Responding to negative reviews characterizing the cast's performances as "high-flown and jarringly incongruous," Michael Shindler of The American Conservative wrote that such comments overlook those performances relation to the film's "dramatic substance," "a conflict of high-flown and jarringly incongruous personalities vying to remake Gucci in their own image," arguing in that vein that the film, like Scott's All the Money in the World is a historical drama about the emergence of "a new man whose very character is adapted to the demands of contemporary commerce," comparing J. Paul Getty's role in the latter to that of Tom Ford.
IMDb page.
Garry Gillard | New: 6 February, 2022 | Now: 25 January, 2024