158 min | R | November 24, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
A secretary marries into Italian fashion royalty and decides she likes the throne more than the man. Patrizia Reggiani climbs into the House of Gucci and starts rearranging the furniture. By the end she is rearranging the family tree.
Patrizia Reggiani is an outsider who marries Maurizio Gucci and discovers that the Gucci name is worth more than any one person who carries it. The film tracks her from ambitious secretary to the woman who orchestrates her ex-husband’s murder. Ridley Scott frames this as a true-crime saga draped in fur and gold. What it is really about is a brand eating the family that built it. The Guccis betray one another over logos and licensing deals, and the bloodletting is corporate before it is personal.
Lady Gaga plays Patrizia with hunger that never quite hides behind the designer clothes. She makes the woman calculating in one scene and genuinely wounded in the next, and the seams between those modes are the most interesting thing on screen. Adam Driver plays Maurizio as a passive heir who hardens into something colder than his wife. Al Pacino plays Aldo Gucci with warmth and menace as the patriarch who treats counterfeit handbags as a personal insult. Jared Leto buries himself under prosthetics as the buffoonish Paolo, and the performance pulls the film toward farce every time he appears. Salma Hayek Pinault plays the television psychic Pina Auriemma as the one person who takes Patrizia’s rage seriously.
Scott directs from a script by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna that cannot decide whether it is a tragedy or a camp comedy. The production design does the heavy lifting. Janty Yates dresses every frame in period couture, and the boutiques and Alpine chalets carry more conviction than half the dialogue. The cast attacks Italian accents at wildly different angles, and the inconsistency turns the soundtrack of the film into its own subplot. Scott shoots the betrayals like board meetings, all polished surfaces and cold light, which is the one tonal choice the movie commits to fully.
The result is a handsome film at war with itself. The performances point in three directions and Scott never forces them into one. There is a sharp satire here about how a family surrenders its identity to a logo, and there is a lurid melodrama about a marriage that curdles into murder. The film tries to be both and keeps interrupting one with the other. It is watchable and well-dressed and never as dangerous as the story it is telling.