Tag Archives: Ridley Scott

House of Gucci

Cast: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, Al Pacino

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Becky Johnston, Roberto Bentivegna

Imagine if the Corleone family in The Godfather were run by the Bluth family in Arrested Development; that’ll get you close to what House of Gucci is. The film tells a scandalous story of greed, seduction, betrayal, and murder in a world of opulence, glamour and dirty, sexy money where every character is a comically despicable and inept nincompoop. At least, that’s what the film seemingly aspires to be, and so it should. A high-budget soap opera with A-list actors delivering ostentatious performances certainly sounds like a good time to me and Ridley Scott is one of the few directors working today with the clout, the talent, and the will to actually make it. And the sumptuous excess of it all is certainly there in the film he’s made; the world of House of Gucci is an often dazzling one of slick suits, elegant purses, and luxurious villas in the Italian countryside that often clashes with how surprisingly unremarkable the rest of the film feels in comparison. With a screenplay that needed more work and a director whose voice feels largely absent, House of Gucci hasn’t much to it beyond the lavish ambience and the total commitment of its cast. The movie is essentially fine, but it’s a far cry from the delicious, campy melodrama that was promised.

The story is that of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), heir to an Italian fashion dynasty and his marriage to Patrizia Reggiani Gucci (Lady Gaga), a middle-class woman with cut-throat ambition. Their marriage would end nearly twenty years after their meeting in 1976 with Patrizia hiring a hit-man to murder her magnate husband. Before then, the film recounts the initial union that caused Maurizio’s disapproving father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) to cut him off, the couple’s engulfment into the family business when Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) takes him in as his protégé, and the ruthless schemings and Machiavellian plots that follow as Patrizia sets out to take the Gucci empire for herself and Maurizio. And so they find themselves in the midst of a familial clash, with Aldo on one side desiring profit above all else to the point that he’s willing to sell cheap Gucci knock-offs for a tidy sum, Rodolfo on another who wishes for Gucci to remain an exclusive, deluxe brand worn only by the likes of Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren, and Aldo’s idiot son Paolo (Jared Leto) on his own third side looking into the future with new, bold, garish designs. Patrizia wants it all to herself however and to get there, she will turn the sheepish, reserved Maurizio into the stone-hearted businessman she desires him to be.

So if stars and their performances are to be the big draw for House of Gucci, there is at least plenty to enjoy there. Signora Gaga, who spoke much in her publicity tour about the method that went into capturing Patrizia’s character, goes all in with the duplicitousness and depravity, never giving an inch for fear that she may not be viewed sympathetically. As far the accent goes, I’ll only say this: I think it’s easy to dunk on an actor’s accent for sounding fake just because we know objectively that it is fake in the same way that it’s easy to call an image that we know was made with CGI fake. Yes, Lady Gaga does sound like Dracula, and for that reason maybe the voice was a bad call, but it really isn’t very dissimilar to how the actual woman sounds. But I’m getting a little off topic here. Ramping it up with Gaga are Pacino, Driver, and above all Leto. Each in their turn offers a style of acting that clashes with the other, making for some fascinating dissonance. Leto, looking and acting like the love child of Fredo Corleone and Waluigi, is all over the place with his unpredictable inflections and distinct eccentricities. While Leto is an actor who seldom does it for me, his level of kookiness is in sync with the wavelength this movie is going for and there is something slightly satisfying about watching him play this sad, pathetic loser, “a triumph of mediocrity” to quote Rodolfo.

At 157 minutes long, House of Gucci simultaneously has too much to do and not enough time to do it. For a chronicle about one of the great fashion dynasties, there is shockingly little discussion of fashion and what exactly it is that makes Gucci’s brand so high-class and unique. For a real-life story that climaxes with the lead character conspiring to have her husband killed, the scenes depicting the eventual plot and its violent end, including Salma Hayek in the role of Patrizia’s psychic reader and co-conspirator, feel very tacked on. House of Gucci would likely have fared better as a 6 episode miniseries on FX than as a two-and-a-half hour movie (though good luck keeping it out of Ryan Murphy’s hands in that scenario) as much of the story feels underdeveloped. As masterful a director as Scott is (just look at The Last Duel from the same year), the case is often that he is only as good as the screenplay he is given, and the screenplay by Johnston and Bentivegna needed a lot more ironing out and a stronger throughline before it could be ready to be turned into a film. For what they actually made, a tighter, shorter edit might have helped to alleviate the portions where the film seriously drags, but it still wouldn’t have brought out the kind of movie they were clearly trying to make.

In the middle of this garbled mess a movie though, there are many pleasures to be found. The stylish outfits (Driver in his cable-knit jumper and huge spectacles and Gaga with her furry winter hat when they go vacationing in the Alps is an all-timer), the unconventional soundtrack (including an Italian cover of ‘I’m a Believer’), the cheesy and baffling dialogue (“It’s time to take out the trash”); there are so many many instances where you just have laugh. Of course, you need the actors hamming it up to make it even remotely watchable and that is the movie’s greatest strength. It’s a type of performance that doesn’t get a lot of praise in a moviegoing culture that has come to favour greater realism in their films and therefore greater naturalism in their actors. That kind of acting is great and all, but there’s nothing quite like watching a larger-than-life performer deliver a spectacle of acting that’s more grandiose, more bombastic, and more ridiculous than anything you could ever hope to see in the real world. In a movie that is all about a family of over-the-top personalities warring over their shared name and legacy, this epic clash of overacting is exactly what’s needed to bring that dynamic to the forefront. If only they had a script that could keep up with them, what a treat House of Gucci would have been.

★★★

The Last Duel

Cast: Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon

Just about every review I’ve read of The Last Duel has drawn comparisons between it and Rashomon, Kurosawa’s mystery masterpiece. The comparison is apt where the structure of the film is concerned, but there is a distinction that is worth exploring. Rashomon, like The Last Duel, is the story of a rape that ignites a duel between two rivals. We hear four different accounts of what happened, each of them a skewed perspective from a narrator with an obvious reason to lie. The film concludes that due to the subjectivity of memory and the vested interests people have in shaping their sides of a story, we can never know the full truth of any given event. Where The Last Duel differs is that there is a clear truth to what happened. The three perspectives we are treated to do vary on specific details and on their overall attitudes towards what happened, but they do fundamentally agree on the course of actions that led to what would be the last legally sanctioned trial by combat in France. It’s the reason why I feel the Rashomon comparison almost misses the point; The Last Duel isn’t a film about determining what happened because, within the boundaries of the film’s narrative (the historical event is another matter), the events are not what is in dispute. This is a story about how our perceptions shape and skew our understanding of the truth.

The film opens in Paris in 1386 with Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) about to engage in a duel to the death while Sir Jean’s wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) watches. We then see three accounts of the events leading up to this duel from each of their perspectives, recounting how Jean and Jacques were friends who fell out, how Jacques raped Marguerite while her husband was away, and how Jean decided that the path to justice was to let God decide the matter in a trial by combat. The reports differ, but only in their framing of the truth rather than their construction of it. In Sir Jean’s chapter, we see him as a proud, courageous, and dutiful soldier who will challenge those more powerful than him for what is right; but in Jacques’ account, Jean is shown as quite an overbearing and pathetic man who is easily offended and too quick to barge in and make a scene without thinking things through. Jacques meanwhile, a favourite of Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), the overlord of the region, thinks himself a dashing and dangerous conquerer of hearts whose rape of Marguerite was in fact a seduction met only with light resistance. When the charges are brought against him, he cannot conceive of rape (as opposed to infidelity) as being his crime because the idea that she did not desire him is inconceivable.

Marguerite’s chapter meanwhile is presented as the ultimate truth of the matter. While this is prompted to an extent by the #MeToo movement and its plea to believe women when they tell their stories about the crimes men have committed to them, it is nevertheless a but reductive to say that’s all the film is doing here. The film does not invite us to believe Marguerite’s perspective simply because she is a woman, but because she has none of Jean or Jacques’ ego compelling her to spin the story in a way that looks favourably upon her. Where Jean saw her a delicate maiden to be protected and Jacques saw her as a flirt only too willing to surrender to his machismo, we see instead nothing more and nothing less than a woman trying to survive and stand up for herself in a world that regards her as merely her husband’s property (when the charges are brought against Jacques, it is for offences made against Jean, not Marguerite). With no image of herself to protect, there is nothing that rings false about Jean being revealed as an inattentive blockhead who only values her as an extent of his estate or of Jacques reading into her looks and smiles what was clearly never there. It’s in playing these subtle nuances that Comer emerges as the film’s undisputed star.

Ridley Scott, no stranger to historical epics about revenge (Gladiator) or stories of women seeking justice (Thelma & Louise) has returned to the scene in 2021 with perhaps his best movie in over a decade. He’s one of the few filmmakers working today with the clout and the will to make this kind of picture, a grown-up drama that demands a level of intellectual engagement from the viewer with a budget to make it on the scale needed to do the story justice. Even if Disney had marketed it worth a damn, it’s unlikely the film would ever have been a massive success. Putting aside the film’s subject matter, which is understandably always going to be one that a portion of the audience will be put off by, The Last Duel is a film that challenges the viewer with conflicting stories that raise pressing questions about masculinity, female agency, and rape culture that speak to the modern day. When a clergy member challenges that it is scientifically impossible for rape to result in a pregnancy, it may be a tad heavy handed, but look me in the eye and tell me that there aren’t any senators in the Republican Party today who don’t believe it to be true. What really impresses about Scott’s effort with The Last Duel is how uncompromised it feels, right down to his refusal to downplay the movie’s more anachronistic qualities (the wigs, the accents, the Damon and Affleck of it all, etc.).

The film was written by Damon and Affleck, their first official collaboration since Good Will Hunting, in collaboration with Nicole Holofcener, writer and director of the excellent Can You Ever Forgive Me?. The three of them together don’t exactly scream ‘rape drama set in Medieval France’, but that is strangely enough what makes them perfect, at least for this very specific film that they’ve made. The Last Duel has no illusions about its modernity, and thus doesn’t bother with subtlety either. When an issue such as rape culture persists as a destructive force in the world to the extent that a story that took place in 14th century France feels just as applicable to the modern world, subtlety only has so much value. Yet at the same time, the film is confident enough in this point that it presents the patriarchal system, one founded on ignorance and cruelty, at face value. There isn’t some audience surrogate character present to vocalise our 21st-century values as there too often are in historical dramas these days. Scott trusts the viewer to be intelligent enough to get there by themselves. It’s the most daring and striking film he’s made in a good long while, and that’s before we even get to the climatic duel itself, one of the best, most intense action scenes of the year. For those who can meet it on its wavelength, The Last Duel is a film well worth the viewer’s time.

★★★★