House of Gucci (2021); The Power of the Dog (2021)
(Lady Gaga as Patrizia and Adam Driver as Mauricio in House of Gucci)
House of Gucci (2021)
The august title House of Gucci might suggest a movie about a historically important dynasty. Since we know the name of the company in the title, we could relish learning about the inner workings of a powerful business, the taste of a legendary fashion trendsetter, or a family’s desire to matter, not just amass wealth.
Sir or madam, the item you seek is out of stock. Instead, your smiling salesman, director Ridley Scott, will open for you elegant boxes filled with insatiable greed, manipulative sex, corporate back-stabbing and coldly plotted murder. Have a seat. The right shoe horn will make whatever pinches fit.
Soap opera? Melodrama? Slick escapism? House of Gucci is all of these, and I found its rollicking, cruel comedy lots of fun.
It’s the true story behind the 1995 murder of Mauricio Gucci (Adam Driver), a killing hatched and paid for by his ruthless ex-wife Patrizia (Lady Gaga).
Early on we learn that the Gucci company has been bequeathed to brothers Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and Aldo (Al Pacino). Rodolfo is a wealthy art collector who loathes corporate machinations. Aldo, on the other hand, openly seeks control in order to expand the Gucci empire. Both men’s sons have radically different reactions to the family legacy.
Rodolfo’s son Mauricio is content to become a quietly competent lawyer and leave the family business behind. Aldo’s son Paolo (Jared Leto) is a fashion designer with minimal talent and no business sense who wants to profit from the Gucci name.
Mauricio, not understanding the tigress he falls for, marries Patrizia Reggiani, a schemer from the middle class (she works at her father’s trucking company) who sees Mauricio as her ticket to wealth and prestige. Rodolfo, appalled that his son would wish to marry a woman so clearly beneath him, cuts off Mauricio’s fortune.
Unfazed, Mauricio happily leaves family ties behind and settles down to life as a working-class husband who cheerfully dons overalls and joins the crew that maintains trucks for his father-in-law's business. But Patrizia, ambitious down to her manicured fingernails, wants him to return to the Gucci business and, however reluctantly, he does so, eventually ending up in charge.
The couple have a daughter, Alessandra, and Patrizia’s wardrobe and jewelry collection expand. But she’s still not satisfied. Mauricio finally tires of Patrizia’s insatiable desire for even more wealth and power. He takes up with another woman, Paola Franchie (Camille Cottin), and eventually divorces Patrizia.
Egged on in her plans for revenge by a TV psychic, Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek), Patrizia determines that she, not the Gucci family or fortune, will decide Mauricio’s fate.
Gaga embraces the tempestuous, unstoppable Patrizia. She’s still more a screen presence than a skilled actress, but what a presence. With her gleaming hungry eyes and electrically sashaying hips, she’s a treat to watch. Her tortuous semi-Italian accent may waver, but Patrizia’s growing malevolence keeps the performance centered.
Ultimately, it’s Gaga’s drive that pulls the camera toward her, and she clearly has acting potential worth developing. Impressively, Gaga declined to meet with the real Patrizia before filming, insisting this screen creation be all her own. It is that.
Driver has a fairly straightforward character arc. Mauricio is an innocent, decent man who mistakenly gives in to worldly desires and doesn’t anticipate the price he’ll pay for abandoning his true self. The actor gives the slow stages of Mauricio’s disillusionment precise, sympathetic shading.
Mauricio’s eyes gradually sadden, his elegant outfits seem to enhance him less, the trappings of wealth and power appear more burdensome than pleasurable. Mauricio has a firm moral center, yet we and almost everyone else in his life realize before he does that his upstanding character won't be enough to protect him.
Pacino as Aldo and Irons as Rodrigo do established actors’ turns with impeccable ease and distinction. Watch how Irons warily lights one of the cigarettes that’s slowly killing him, or how Pacino furiously wields a gold fountain pen to sign away his shares in the Gucci company. Their mastery of detail keeps us guessing what they might say or do next. By contrast, Jared Leto’s Paolo moans and complains to ridiculous excess, and the character arouses no sympathy.
The script by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (based on Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed) keeps a tight grip on sprawling events, but doesn’t adequately explain the Gucci brand’s worldwide appeal. Janty Yates’ sharply tailored costumes neatly straddle flash and stylishness. Dariusz Wolski’s handsome cinematography adroitly turns the movie's look from opulence to dark menace and back again, always suiting the mood.
House of Gucci isn’t a didactic tale about moral consequences or the wages of transgression. It worries one moment, comically winks and nods the next. Maybe these profligate, drifting people similarly bobbed and weaved in real life. But as a revenge tale it’s rarely chilling, because it plays almost entirely on its glittery surface.
Money and power pour from the screen. Genuine mental anguish only whimpers, and thus isn’t given a chance to be truly moving. Instead of moral caution, these moviemakers have decided to give us glitzy pictures of wealth and excess, and let us judge, excuse, or pick and choose options for ourselves. You don't have to just watch this movie. You can also shop for your favorite extravagance and ask how much you might be willing to pay for it.
(Kodi Smit-McPhee (left) as Peter and Benedict Cumberbatch (right) as Phil in The Power of the Dog)
The Power of the Dog (2021)
Set in 1925 on a prosperous Montana cattle ranch, The Power of the Dog centers on two brothers with starkly different personalities.
Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) seems to have been carved out of the surrounding mountains. He's hard and immovable. Though he attended Yale, in the years since he’s taken to wearing dirty leather chaps and bathing only fitfully; in fact, he seems most himself when sparring with or bullying anyone who comes near, from ranch hands to his mild-mannered older brother.
That would be George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), plump, dull and timid, a man of few words who rarely complains or celebrates. Trim, muscular Phil publicly calls George “Fatso” to keep him cowed. Phil supervises the grimy routines of ranching, from rustling cattle to castrating bulls. George sees to the business side. Phil reads voraciously. George fills his mind with light magazines and vague dreams of marriage.
In adapting the spare, evocative 1967 novel The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage, writer-director Jane Campion has foreshortened Savage’s slow reveal of his characters’ fates. In Campion’s hands, their gooses look cooked nearly as soon as we lay eyes on them.
In setting up a classic sibling rivalry, Savage yoked the brothers together in shared ownership of a thriving ranch ceded to them by their parents. They never asked for it. Both men are bachelors, they continue to share a bedroom, and for decades they’ve almost ritualistically scraped each other’s nerves. The novel pitied these sadly unreconciled men. The brothers offer each other only grudging respect and rarely speak genuinely to one another. They certainly don’t love ranching. It seems they’ve been condemned to it. Savage’s novel reads like a long, plaintive song, with a sad guitar strumming under its precise, never-pretty prose.
For these forlorn siblings, Savage wept.
Campion frets, shrouding their story in gloom. The movie fills the screen with rowdy cowboys, stampeding herds, sweeping vistas and almost pathologically researched production design, but it feels like you’ve stepped into a museum. And the action, mostly, is pokey.
Into this soul-killing stillness comes Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a local widow with a teenaged son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Smitten, George offers Rose his hand in marriage and she, lonely, with a moody son she loves but can't always figure out, says yes.
She knows nothing of ranching, and when the newlyweds arrive at the enormous homestead, a glowering Phil accuses her on sight, to her face, of being a pretending schemer. He never relents in denigrating and humiliating her, which turns Rose into a sneaking, guzzling drunk.
At first Phil seems to have no use, either, for slender, bookish Peter, who wants to follow in his deceased father's footsteps and become a doctor. When Peter comes home from boarding school for a summer visit, Phil and the ranch hands laugh callously at the gangling young man’s awkward attempts to ride.
But something about Peter waylays Phil. He sees in the boy an opportunity to reaffirm his own rugged masculinity by teaching Peter its trappings and tricks, showing him how to steady himself in the saddle, and exploring the countryside with him on horseback.
Phil eventually, reverently, reveals to Peter his lifelong devotion to the memory of Bronco Henry, a deceased ranch hand who'd been a hero and mentor to Phil at roughly the same age Peter is now. Henry was a man's man who turned herding cattle into a calling, a masculine entitlement. When Phil and Henry had sometimes slept together, naked, out in the wilderness, Phil explains to Peter, it had only confirmed the purity of their friendship.
Listening closely, Peter isn’t buying. Ingratiating himself with Phil, he sees into the man’s sexual infatuation with Henry, and the self-hating vulnerability he’s now shadowed by. The homoeroticism Phil has secretly nurtured over decades, feverishly keeping it hidden, along with his stash of male “muscle culture” magazines, soon becomes obvious to Peter. Behind Phil’s hypermasculinity, Peter sees fear.
Campion flattens Phil’s tragic lifelong sexual panic that’s so lucidly laid out in Savage’s novel. She pounds it into simple meanness, cowardice and cunning. And the grand, sculptural visuals in Ari Wegner's aridly proficient cinematography don’t illuminate much.
All this high, static art muffles the splendid melancholy in Savage’s pages. Campion and Wegner have clearly studied Western painting and illustration, but they might have done better to look at a handsomely shot, lively, sometimes moving studio Western like George Stevens’ Giant (1956), or at a rowdy, jam-packed independent feature like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). (It is nice, though, to see here, in the small role of Montana's governor, Keith Carradine, an Altman stalwart who appears in McCabe).
Bick Benedict's sprawling, Texas-opulent ranch in Giant, or the grungy, unruly zinc miners in McCabe, might have inspired Campion to let the story breathe and give her movie more juice. In those two older movies, only actual unfulfilled dreams were left to the imagination. The rest of life was lived out loud, however cagily it sometimes needed to be managed. Savage writes in that reserved but heartfelt, straight-from-the-shoulder, Western tradition (while steering clear of Edna Ferber’s melodrama).
Here the characters seem propelled by an unseen hand. Cumberbatch fares best because he knows how to structure a performance. He parcels out Phil’s suppressed anger and longing, and gives the sad rancher’s wicked grins and violent outbursts a look of unrelieved, buried sorrow. But, unfortunately for us, his scowling can still seem affected, so prim, tony and refined is Campion behind the camera. (To see Cumberbatch outlandishly, seductively vile, watch him in BBC2’s Richard III, where his reptilian, murderous King gleefully invites, and earns, our hatred.)
Plemons is consistent as the stolid George, who surprisingly finds real happiness once he’s married, but his very good performance isn’t matched by Dunst’s drunken downfall. The script lets Rose buckle too easily to Phil's cruelty, and the more we see and hear her wail, the more wearying and baffling she becomes. Smit-McPhee is careful not to make the respectful, observant Peter too easily manipulated. He's a willowy actor, but, skillfully, he never suggests effeminacy in the role, and lets us slowly grasp that the muted Peter is shrewdly, darkly devious.
The movie reduces sometimes desolate, sometimes resilient people into servants of Campion’s lofty art, letting quaintly arranged effects stand in for the anguish that inspired actors actually could have played. Mid-movie, right before a fancy dinner party, Phil merrily chortles that, since he bathes only once a month, he unashamedly stinks. I wish the movie gave off more of the scent of pain, risk and danger, the nervous sweat that becomes palpable when secrets are desperately clung to.