SASSY GAGA CAN’T SAVE GUCCI
House Of Gucci (15, 157 mins) Verdict: A fashion disaster ★★✩✩✩
SIR Ridley Scott’s lavish new film has divided critics, as I’m sure it will audiences. From where I was sitting (for at least 30 minutes more than I would have liked), it was far too long, muddled both in narrative and tone, uncertain in its occasional attempts at comedy, and unnecessarily burdened with the distraction of Englishspeaking actors speaking English with Italian accents.
As you’ll probably be aware by now, it tells the undoubtedly fascinating true story of how low-born Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) came to marry the fashion empire heir Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), how their marriage foundered, and how, in 1995, she had him murdered.
Much of the publicity has focused on Gaga’s teenage experience of sexual assault, which she used to inform a performance so intensely committed that she stayed in character, on set and off, for nine months.
Gucci canvas hats off to her for that, and I won’t join those sniggering at her codItalian vowels, either. She does no better or worse than anyone else, and in fact compounds her status, established by 2018’s A Star Is Born, as a fine and charismatic actress.
Of the other star names involved, Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino also do splendid work, playing elderly Gucci brothers Rodolfo and Aldo, who divided up the empire between them.
But as the latter’s idiotic son, Paolo, an unrecognisable Jared Leto is little more than a pantomime turn, offering moments of fun but also a sense that Scott and his writers are forcing humour into a movie that needs remedial work more urgently in other areas.
All of which is a shame, because, as you would expect, it looks great. n a longEr version of this review ran
in tuesday’s paper.