Jared Leto does his usual disguise act as Paolo Gucci, a balding and clownish cousin with big designer aspirations and little talent.
The movie starts around 1978 and ends in 1998, but vampiric Gaga and Driver never age or perceptibly change over two decades. They get married and she goes from wide-eyed and innocent to a savvy businesswoman with a thirst for power. Gaga plays Patrizia, a girl of modest means who meets rich Gucci heir Maurizio (Adam Driver, also Russian) at a party and begins dating him. Really it’s a hodgepodge of wacko performances and disparate tones that “Project Runway” guru Tim Gunn would call “a lot of look.” The movie starts around 1978 and ends in 1998, but vampiric Gaga never ages. Well, that’s what Scott and screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna imagine it to be.
The preceding two-and-a-half hours are a glacial yet completely uninformative history of the luxe brand framed as a “Succession”-like struggle for power among the Gucci family. Mystifyingly, the front-page killing and ensuing court battle only take up the last 10 minutes of this sleep aid. The abysmal “Gucci” would get a better grade, perhaps, if it were a term paper titled “How to Make the Assassination of a Famous Person Boring.” Lady Gaga plays the role of Patrizia Reggiani in “House of Gucci.” ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection She’s as authentic as the rest of Ridley Scott’s puffed-up, ponderous drama, whose quest for Oscar glory officially ends today. Does Lady Gaga’s accent in the new film “House of Gucci” sound remotely Italian?Īs Patrizia Reggiani, the crazed woman who had her fashion mogul husband Maurizio Gucci killed in 1995, Mother Monster comes off as Russian as Boris and Natasha, Mikhail Gorbachev and a cold bowl of borscht.
Rated R (language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence).