Warning: contains spoilers, I suppose.
I knew the absolute bare minimum about Gucci before I went to see this film. I knew it was an Italian fashion house. I didn’t know anything about the family, the history, the style: nothing. This was both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing was this: the end was a surprise to me! I realise I am probably the only person to experience this and you may well be stunned by my ignorance; let me plead my case… Yes, I had clocked that the trailer mentioned “murder” – now I watch it again I can clearly see who the target was, but this wasn’t clear to me in that initial flashy blur of unfamiliar events and characters. And when *that* happened in real life in 1995 I had just turned 2, and the event had somehow never crossed my radar since. So I didn’t know who was going to be murdered or why, or at what point in the film it might occur, or whether it was likely to be a central theme or a subplot.
The curse was this: I had no idea what the film was trying to be. Was it a film about the family? The marriage? The business? (It certainly wasn’t about fashion, which is rather what I had been expecting/hoping for.) Only at the end did I see where it had all been leading, and could understand some of the preceding two and a half hours. I think this was a case where you needed prior knowledge; like an episode of Columbo where you know who-dunnit from the outset, but the joy is in seeing how Columbo pieces it all together – here I think the intended purpose was to usher the viewer along the reconstructed timeline of events, sweeping us inevitably from love to the contract killing that everyone should have known was coming.
Except I don’t think it worked. We began and ended with the couple – but in the middle we had strayed from them, diverted into long scenes concerning the business. Patrizia disappeared for a significant stretch of time, and (in my ignorance) I didn’t know whether she was coming back. And while we were given great detail of business dealings, it seemed as though we skipped a chapter in the story of the marriage. Abruptly they were unhappy – Maurizio had fundamentally changed, and this didn’t seem to be explained by any trigger. (This is not to fault the acting – I thought Adam Driver and Lady Gaga were both excellent – they had just been given a story arc which seemed disjointed to me).
After I watched it, I had to go away and educate myself about the historic events. The realisation that of course many of these people are still alive made me feel uneasy. There is an ongoing debate about how long we should wait before we dramatise real life – my tendency is to think that if the people concerned are still alive and not consulted/involved/supportive, then it is too soon. (In fact, I feel dramatisation of any history is “too soon” if it does not treat events with the sensitivity and respect that they deserve.) In this case, the family are unhappy that they have been depicted as “thugs”, Maurizio’s daughters feel that their pain has been manipulated for profit, and even Patrizia, who received a sympathetic portrayal, nevertheless said “I am rather annoyed at the fact that Lady Gaga is playing me… without having had the consideration and sensibility to come and meet me”. I think Tom Ford put it best: “I often laughed out loud, but was I supposed to? … I was deeply sad for several days after watching House of Gucci, a reaction that I think only those of us who knew the players and the play will feel. It was hard for me to see the humor and camp in something that was so bloody.”
Tellingly, Lady Gaga, in the midst of some fairly extreme method acting, drove past the site of the murder and thought “What have I done? We made art out of pain.”
So what was this film trying to be? I can tell you that the outfits were fantastic, the music was fun, and I now know a lot more about the Gucci family. But what was its message? I don’t really know. And if I can’t tell you that, surely there wasn’t justification for exploiting real-life trauma.
Cryptic Meg 