Old Yorker

  • House of Gucci

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (2021)

    Over the last forty years or so, I’ve walked out of more Ridley Scott films (Alien, A Good Year, The Counsellor) than I’ve enjoyed (Thelma & Louise, The Martian).  House of Gucci is Scott’s twenty-seventh feature and, at 158 minutes, his longest so far (outlasting American Gangster by one minute)[1].  I can’t help feeling I did well to see it through but why is the picture so lengthy?  Mainly, it seems, because Scott can’t decide if he’s making a Godfather-style epic of dynastic intrigue and corruption, or a camp-fest.  House of Gucci staggers on, as if to help him make up his mind.  There’s only one good reason for staying with the film – the lead actress.

    The story begins in the early 1970s, when Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) first meets her future husband, Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver).  It climaxes in 1995, when hitmen hired by Patrizia shoot Maurizio dead.  At the start, Patrizia runs the office at her father’s trucking firm and Maurizio is a law student, as well as heir, through his father, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), to half the Gucci fashion house and fortune.  Rodolfo dismisses Patrizia as a gold-digger and, when his son ignores his warnings and marries her, disinherits Maurizio.  Once she’s pregnant, smart, opportunistic Patrizia sees the child she’s having as a means to getting Maurizio back in Rodolfo’s good books, and will.  She charms Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and his dim-witted, would-be designer son Paolo (Jared Leto); Aldo successfully persuades Rodolfo to reconcile with Maurizio but the old man dies before signing a document transferring the 50% of Gucci shares to his son.  Nothing daunted, Patrizia fakes Rodolfo’s signature.  Pulling the strings of her husband, who’s lukewarm about the business, she embarks on a plan to acquire shares from Aldo and Paolo, who hold the remaining 50%.

    Much of what follows describes Patrizia’s successful attempts to discredit or incriminate Aldo and Paolo – the former for tax evasion in the US, the latter for unauthorised use of the Gucci trademark, and so on.  When the police try to arrest Maurizio for forging his father’s signature, he and Patrizia flee Italy for Switzerland, where Maurizio starts an affair with old flame Paola Franchi (Camille Cottin).  Perhaps under Paola’s influence (though this isn’t clear – nor, to me, was why he felt safe returning to Italy), Maurizio becomes more interested in running Gucci.  He recruits hot-shot American designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) to revitalise the Gucci brand, and hatches his own scheme for getting his hands on the shares Aldo and Paolo have clung onto.  Maurizio proves a hopeless businessman.  As a result of his mismanagement, the equity company from which he has sought help, buys him out; Ford and Maurizio’s long-serving wingman, Domenico De Sole (Jack Huston), take over at the top.  Patrizia, after refusing Maurizio’s request for a divorce, decides to have her husband killed.  The closing text on the screen explains that she was convicted of murder, along with the gunmen and Pina (Salma Hayek), her friend, personal psychic and partner-in-crime. Patrizia ‘the Black Widow’ Reggiani is still serving her long prison sentence.

    Even though two of them are Italian Americans, Ridley Scott insists on his principal cast members abandoning their normal voices in favour of spicka-da-Eengleesh accents, managed with strikingly varying degrees of success.  Worse, the director’s scattershot approach to the material appears to confuse at least one of his stars while allowing others to do what they like, to gruesome effect.  Adam Driver tries to play Maurizio reasonably straight, in a fruitless search for depth in the role as written (by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna).  In contrast, Al Pacino’s and Jared Leto’s interpretations of Aldo and Paolo are garishly overdrawn.  Tonally chaotic, the film nearly grinds to a halt each time Leto, under a ton of prosthetic make-up, is doing his turn.  The main men in House of Gucci are so annoying I could have forgiven Patrizia for killing them all.

    I soon came to dread the every reappearance of Pacino and Leto so can only be thankful that the reverse was true with Lady Gaga.  On their first encounter, Maurizio flatters Patrizia by roguishly pretending to mistake her for Elizabeth Taylor.  It’s an inadvertently apt comparison.  In her Hollywood heyday, Taylor not only gave some fine performances in good pictures but also understood, and accepted, when she wasn’t in a good picture.  In the latter cases (Raintree County and The VIPs are two examples), she still played her role without condescension or contempt.  She knew she was dealing with trash but her acting was engaged and impassioned[2].  Lady Gaga has a similar quality in House of Gucci.  In this, her first starring non-singing screen role, she’s unfailingly vivid and emotionally uncompromising, whatever she’s asked to do.  The other women’s parts aren’t up to much – Camille Cottin and Salma Hayek are more or less wasted – although Mia McGovern Zaini, as Patrizia and Maurizio’s unhappy daughter Alessandra, is a silently distressing presence.

    The couple’s courtship provides the only nuanced exchanges in the whole film.  The collapse of their relationship is treated as a given:  Scott and his screenwriters virtually ignore what’s happening in the marriage until Maurizio hotfoots it to St Moritz and Patrizia, when she joins him, is portrayed, suddenly and crudely, as an arriviste embarrassment to her husband and his jet-set circle of friends.  Harry Gregson-Williams’s score is eclipsed throughout by the snatches of opera and pop songs that Scott piles onto the soundtrack.  The classical stuff is there to underline the emotional extremity of the story:  after all, Scott seems to be saying, these people are Italians and you know what they’re like … !  The pop choices tend to be crushingly obvious:  ‘I’ve Got Your Number’, sung by Bobby Short, when Patrizia brings to light Aldo’s unpaid taxes; ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ (Andy Williams), as a joyless family Christmas gets underway.  Personal and business relationships disintegrate to the accompaniment of Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

    Scott’s view of his characters is hard to make sense of.  He skewers them for two-and-a-half hours yet there’s a note of regret in the closing legends recording that Aldo and Paolo died, from prostate cancer and in poverty, respectively, soon after the sale of their shares to Maurizio – and that the Gucci company of today includes no family members.  Next to Lady Gaga’s performance, the film’s main asset is Patrizia’s wardrobe, designed by Janty Yates (and which Gaga wears with aplomb).  Perhaps there’s more fun to be had from this mess if you’re au fait with the big names of the fashion world and can spot them passing through.  I managed only Anna Wintour (Catherine Walker), thanks to the hairdo; it was very late on that I even twigged Maurizio’s American signing was Tom Ford, who is deemed to need no introduction.  I’d never heard of Ford until he turned movie director with A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals – both seriously overrated, neither as bad as House of Gucci.

    7 December 2021

    [1] To be more precise, House of Gucci is the longest Scott film shown in cinemas.  The director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven (which I’ve not seen in any version) is 194 minutes.

    [2] This didn’t stop her calling out the trash in due course but her disparagement of Butterfield 8 (‘it stinks’) didn’t show in her performance, for which Taylor won her first Oscar.

  • Dark Waters

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Haynes (2019)

    After being admitted to the bar in 1990, Robert Bilott worked at a Cincinnati law firm, specialising in the defence of chemical companies in litigation cases.  Some eight years later, he had just been made a partner in the firm when he took on the case of Wilbur Tennant, a West Virginia farmer whose cattle were mysteriously dying.  Tennant’s farm was downstream from a landfill where the chemical giant DuPont had been dumping unregulated and hazardous chemicals.  This was the start of Bilott’s remarkable switch into environmental law and biting the hand that had once fed him.  In the years that followed, he devoted himself to uncovering a major public health scandal:  an independent scientific panel eventually confirmed a probable link between DuPont’s chemical contamination of drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio, and the high incidence in local communities of kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis.  Come 2016, Bilott was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile by Nathaniel Rich, entitled ‘The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare’.  Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, with a screenplay based on Rich’s profile, is a dramatisation of these events.

    You can often watch a true-story drama – especially one involving people who in reality are still highly active, as Rob Bilott is – and end up thinking:  this should have been a documentary.  It’s not easy for film-makers working with such material to reconcile the twin imperatives of conveying complex information and ensuring emotional involvement with characters in their story – and the latter tends to be given priority.  Dark Waters is something of an exception.  First, because by the time it went into production, a feature-length documentary on the subject, Stephanie Soechtig’s The Devil We Know (2018), had already been released.  Second, because Haynes’s narrative seems to defeat the purpose of dramatising the material – it’s subdued, workaday and uninvolving.

    Things soon start going wrong.  At the beginning of Dark Waters there’s a definite suggestion that it’s been a hard road to a partnership for Rob (Mark Ruffalo) – that he’s finally made it professionally – but Haynes is quickly impatient to cut to the chase of his David hero taking on the Goliath corporate vested interests on whose behalf he previously worked.  When his grandmother (Marcia Dangerfield) tells him about Wilbur Tennant, her friend and neighbour, and seeks Rob’s help, it’s nowhere near enough of a dilemma for him.  It doesn’t help either that his first meeting with Tennant (Bill Camp) is clunky – even assuming the exchange really happened, you don’t believe this version of it.  The director’s haste denies his lead actor scope for rooting his character, a problem compounded by the sketchy writing of Rob’s home life, especially his marriage to Sarah (Anne Hathaway).

    Haynes and Matthew Michael Carnahan, who did the screenplay, may well have wanted to handle with care because the Bilotts are still married but their discretion leaves Anne Hathaway hardly anything to work with.  We get the message that Sarah Barlage Bilott was herself a legal high-flyer, who sacrificed her own career for the sake of her husband’s and to bring up their three sons (played by various boys at different ages).  It’s impossible, though, to accept that this smart, self-assured woman would have had so little to say about her husband’s gruelling campaign for justice – and it’s hardly surprising that, on the rare occasions the script does supply a domestic showdown between them, Hathaway goes at it too eagerly.  Sarah’s reticence seems, more than anything, a convenience for Haynes, who’s keen to minimise interruptions to the detective work and litigation driving the plot.

    Since Mark Ruffalo looks weary and unwell from the word go, the effects of Rob’s obsession don’t register as clearly as they probably should – at least until he collapses and is carted off to hospital.  Anne Hathaway has her strongest moment when Sarah, talking in a hospital corridor with Rob’s boss (Tim Robbins), loses patience with his concerned platitudes and tartly tells him, ‘Don’t talk to me like I’m “the wife”’.  (Of course, this also serves to underline the implausibility of her suffering in silence most of the time.)  In the main supporting roles, Tim Robbins gives a well-judged performance but the scary eyebrows that Bill Camp wears make him look OTT even before his strenuous playing is underway.  Mare Winningham is good as a local woman supportive of what Rob is trying to do but a potentially interesting larger theme – of the community’s persisting feelings of loyalty to DuPont because of economic benefits they’ve supposedly brought to the region – is barely developed beyond a couple of brief, obvious illustrations.

    You wouldn’t guess that this film was made by the author of Far from Heaven (2002), I’m Not There (2007) and Carol (2015), except for the occasional, beautifully impressive landscape images of Edward Lachman, Todd Haynes’s regular cinematographer.  Dark Waters isn’t just unexpected territory for Hayes; it turns out to be alien territory, too.  He has, more often than not, written his own screenplays and there’s no doubt that he’s saddled here with a weak script credited to another hand.  Haynes may also have felt, given the seriousness of the real-life events he’s describing, that he should let these do the talking and not impose himself on the narrative.  Whatever the factors, the resulting film falls between two stools.  With comparable material, Steven Soderbergh achieved in Erin Brockovich (2000) a broadly satisfying balance between heroising the title character and telling a socio-legally important true story.  Dark Waters lacks the melodramatic energy to work as a coarse but emotionally effective crowd-pleaser.  It’s too shallow to be convincing drama.

    4 December 2021

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