FILM
Eighties pop needle-drops —
from George Michael’s Faith
to the Eurythmics — but God
is it enjoyable. Scott, 83,
seems to be riding the crest
of a late-breaking career
renaissance at the moment,
with this film following on the
heels of last month’s The Last
Duel with almost unseemly
haste, but of the two films it’s
this one I want to watch again.
Few directors are more at
home in the world of extreme
wealth than Scott. It probably
helps to have started in
advertising — every frame of his
films has an avaricious gleamto it — but as he’s got older, with
films such as The Counsellor,
All the Money in the World and
now House of Gucci, the scalpel
with which he lays bare the
desiccated morality and
decadence of the obscenely
rich has grown ever sharper.
Of all the performances, it’s
Irons who gets this the most.
With his hooded eyes,
movie-star past and wreaths
of cigarette smoke, Irons’s
Rodolfo would have been right
at home in a Luchino Visconti
film: he’s a ghoulish, hollow-
eyed snob made brittle by his
own wealth. “How manyOveracting is underrated. Yes,
it’s nice to see a technician
such as Meryl Streep or Stanley
Tucci hand in their minimalist
homework — superbly
modulated, full of nuance, i’s
dotted, t’s crossed — but
sometimes it’s just as fun to see
someone open their lungs,
liberate their limbs and let rip.
That appears to have been
the thinking behind Jared
Leto’s performance as Paolo
Gucci, the idiot son of the
Italian fashion label Gucci in
Ridley Scott’s indecently
entertaining House of Gucci.
Wearing a bald wig, a corduroy
safari suit whose groove is so
deep you could park a Vespa in
it, and wielding a mamma mia
accent so broad it could knock
down Pavarotti, Leto gives
us an operatic portrait of
mediocrity: a designer full of
himself yet blissfully free of
talent, who believes that were
it not for his father holding
him back, he would “soar like
a pigeon”. He’s right about one
thing: were it not for the actor
playing his father, Leto would
steal the film.
The thing is this: his father
is played by Al Pacino, who
knows a thing or two about
overacting. When it comes to
taking over the screen like an
inflatable dinghy, Pacino has
stolen more movies than Leto
has had biscotti, and as Aldo
Gucci, the New-York-based
moneyman of the brand
— “Konichiwa!” he greets his
Japanese buyers with — Pacino
oozes a bonhomie so tan and
leathery it is small wonder
they don’t turn him into an
exclusive line of luxury
handbags. “Without me you’d
all be shovelling cow shit in
Tuscany,” he drawls.
Here’s the best thing: Leto
and Pacino are not even the
film’s leads. The leads are
Adam Driver, as dithering heir
apparent Maurizio Gucci, who
is disinherited by his father,
Rodolfo Gucci ( Jeremy Irons),
when he marries Patrizia
Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a pushy
arriviste in a pencil skirt
whose father owns a trucking
company. “How come I haven’t
seen you before?” he says on
meeting her at a party. “You
weren’t looking hard enough,”
she replies, writing her number
in lipstick on his moped.
Gaga sucks up every scene
she is in and seems to harbour
takeover bids for even those
she is not in. Patrizia sets her
sights first on getting Maurizio
back in the business, then on
taking over the business, and
finally — and you will have got
this from the trailer, even if
you don’t remember the
actual event — hiring a pair of
assassins with the help of a TV
tarot reader named Giuseppina
(Salma Hayek) to make sure
her views are heard. That’s the
spine of the film, anyway: a
rake’s progress, a villainess on
the make, and Gaga sinks into
it as she does the foam bath
into which she pulls Maurizio,And the
Oscar for
overacting
goes to...
Jared Leto, Al Pacino, Lady Gaga and
Jeremy Irons vie for honours in Ridley
Scott’s enjoyable fashion-house romp
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