Possibly one of the worst directed films in recent memory, and what’s more surprising is that it’s coming from one of the world’s most prolific modern-day directors. From scene to scene there’s absolutely no consistency in so many elements of the film that is just becomes a slog to get through and considering its lengthy runtime, it’s hard not to just leave the film feeling an immense sense of boredom.
Starting with the performances. Every single performance feels like they’ve been pulled out of a different film and stitched together into this mess. Even from scene to scene some performances are completely inconsistent, switching from a serious Oscar baity drama to a semi-comedic take on the story that makes you question whether on not you should be laughing at the scenarios they get in. Lady Gaga is in an odd position, while she doesn’t make the film any worse, she certainly doesn’t make it any better. Yet place her performance in a well directed, tonally consistent film and an Oscar nomination would make sense, it’s just hard to say that about the film we got as she doesn’t match the tones of any other performance.
Al Pacino could also be placed in the same boat, he’s just so indifferent in the film. However there are actors who actively made the film awful. Jared Leto feels like he’s acting in a pantomime, his over-the-top performance is so wildly out of place it’s actively distracting. While Selma Hayek’s character is obviously a part of the real life story, her character is just so bizarre in this otherwise grounded world and she’s used so sparingly that it felt weird to include her at all. Across the board we were treated too some atrocious accents but Jeremy Irons takes the cake for the worst. Some sentences he would start it what I guess would be described as Italian and it would just slowly devolve into British. Again this was just another thing that slowly brought you out of the film.
The film just doesn’t know what it wants to be and that’s the problem, it had no clear direction. The performances are inconsistent, there’s no tonal through line, the colour grading switches from scene to scene, it’s just an all round mess. The two departments responsible for the film going from meh to unwatchable are the editing and the writing. The story we’re invited to watch sprawls over multiple years, and because of this we just get glimpses of events in their lives. This results in a nearly 3 hour montage essentially that just becomes exhausting to watch after a while as within each scene there’s no real development happening.
It feels as if Scott had no vision for this film at all, not giving any advice to the editors on how each scene should feel or where it should cut. Often scenes would just end out of nowhere, with nothing of note really happing within them. Paradoxically, this lengthy film moves at such a pace that characters are suddenly completely different from who they were 10 minutes prior, and you’re left questioning what made them change their personality. This is where Maurizio suffers. For the majority of the film he’s this “nice” guy, who’s shy and doesn’t want to be in charge of the business, his wife is really in charge. Then suddenly that all changes and there’s no discernible turning point, nor has film built a slow progression of his character becoming corrupted, it just happens.
This film was just aimless and sadly there’s nothing of note really to save this film. If the film focussed on Patrizia and what motivates her and caused her to do what she did it would’ve been better for it. You leave the film not even knowing why she did what she did, the film paints her as such a dumb person but also wanted to show how smart she was to build the Gucci business. It’s a train wreck of a film and Gaga and Driver couldn’t save it
★
