House of Gucci movie review & film summary 2021

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• Awards Season Calendar: Key Dates for Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Other Major Events
• Hot Docs Festival: Middle Eastern Films Get Spotlight Amid Israel-Hamas War
• You’re in!
• Amazon Sets 2024 Prime Experience Emmy FYC Event; ‘Fallout’, ‘Expats’, ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Among Featured Shows
• Cast
• CBS Cancels Drama Series After 3 Seasons; Stars, Creators React

LETO When I shot Dallas Buyers Club, I remember going somewhere and having people treat me completely differently. To not be recognized by your fellow actors was a whole other level — Jeremy Irons told me he didn’t realize it was me in our first scene. The other movie was Scarface, funnily enough.

Awards Season Calendar: Key Dates for Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Other Major Events

Then there’s Aldo’s son, Paolo, a frustrated designer who dresses in things like lavender corduroy suits. Then Maurizio introduces Patrizia to his father, the elegant and formidable Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), once a minor screen actor, now a vampirish tycoon with Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” hanging on the wall of his parlor. He’s the lordly co-owner and patriarch of the Gucci brand; he can’t conceive that his only son would wed someone who is this beneath him. Maurizio, however, wins the audience’s admiration for standing by his romantic convictions. He marries Patrizia (to the tune of George Michael’s “Faith”), even as his father cuts him out of the family fortune. House of Gucci, released by United Artists Releasing, is the highest grossing drama during the pandemic, making close to $52M stateside and $145M WW.

Hot Docs Festival: Middle Eastern Films Get Spotlight Amid Israel-Hamas War

It’s not fair to call these performances dull, as they’re only mimicking the film’s portrayal of these real-life figures, but it’s also hard to call them incredible or entertaining at times. I’d argue that if we didn’t have Jared Leto’s performance as Paolo Gucci in House of Gucci, the movie would be panned for being overly heavy-handed and frankly not fun to watch. House of Gucci is about an obscenely rich family, and how greed, betrayal and murder ultimately led to their ousting from the company that bears their name. It’s incredibly dark, to the point it’s not all that fun to witness.

You’re in!

He made me shake with fear, but it was beautiful.

Paolo Gucci died from heart and kidney failure at the age of 64, a few months after the murder of his cousin, Maurizio. Also in the mix is Aldo’s son Paolo, brought to life by Jared Leto, whose outrageous (and extremely fun) gaudiness single-handedly earns the aforesaid “rock concert” analogy. Leto’s approach to the role instantly proves apt for Paolo, an incompetent businessman wannabe and an aspiring fashion designer with little taste and even less talent.

Casting

After an argument between Maurizio and Patrizia, he decides he is tired of his wife's influence on himself and the company. He orders his wife and daughter to return to Italy and begins an affair with Paola, which Pina seemingly senses. Aldo introduces Patrizia to his eccentric son Paolo, who aspires to be a designer within Gucci despite his lack of talent. Aldo helps Maurizio and a terminally ill Rodolfo reconcile shortly before the latter's death.

We see Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci go from lovers who didn’t give a damn about fortune to it being the only thing that defines them. It’s captivating to watch, but by the end, there’s not a damn thing likable about these two, and it’s not like the rest of the Gucci family is portrayed any better. Like Scott’s 2017 Getty family drama All the Money in the World, House of Gucci does a solid job of evoking its recent-history milieu, boasting a beige and brown palette that reeks of nicotine and caffeine, with occasional bursts of reportage-style monochrome. Musically, it’s a cheesy jukebox treat, Pavarotti and Tracy Chapman rubbing shoulders with Caterina Caselli and Blondie, and a wedding played out to the strains of George Michael’s Faith. That’s certainly how Jeremy Irons’s increasingly vampiric Rodolfo sees her when he disowns his son for marrying into a family of “truck drivers!

Cast

Rodolfo writes Maurizio back into his will but fails to sign the document attesting him the 50% interest in Gucci shares before he dies, so Patrizia forges Rodolfo's signature on Rodolfo's updated testament. "Subtlety is the hardest," the actor says. "Silence is the most important note you can play. We're all made up of those nuances. I don't want to give away all of my secrets—I have to keep some for myself." And we'll keep trying to figure it all out, wherever the next chestnut falls. "It's not a good thing to do to your body," he says, but it was helpful going out in public with a menacing demeanor, weird enough that people "recoiled" from him. "It was a very dark piece of material, at a time when I was interested in that sort of thing," he recalls.

'House of Gucci': Jared Leto is unrecognizable as fashion figure - USA TODAY

'House of Gucci': Jared Leto is unrecognizable as fashion figure.

Posted: Wed, 24 Nov 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]

CBS Cancels Drama Series After 3 Seasons; Stars, Creators React

Leto, when he arrived on set, even fooled co-star Al Pacino (who plays his father Aldo), The Godfather actor blown away by the 360-degree costume. Leto didn't realize it at the time, but the first step in preparing to play Gucci came 16 years ago on the set of Lonely Hearts, where he spent hours plucking hairs out of his head to make himself bald enough to play the serial killer Raymond Fernandez. It was a "brutal" decision that didn't end up working, he admits, though Leto initially wanted to try again in creating Gucci's hairless dome ("I was going to shave my head"). Practicality stood in the way, so he used a bald cap to complete his metamorphosis into the family outcast who, like him, suffered for his art.

Ridley decided that we didn’t need it and we got rid of it. I mean, I’ve been very lucky, at one point, the script was 150 pages long, which is kind of insane. It got down to 135 by the time we were shooting.

Through it all, Salma Hayek’s naive psychic Pina guides the increasingly distraught queen-bee Patrizia with prophecies about the future, lending the film some of its most hysterical scenes. Leto strayed from movies for nearly six years after Chapter 27, touring with his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, until he read the script for Dallas Buyers Club, which presented another opportunity to disappear—even on set. "They only saw one person there and it certainly wasn't Jared Leto," he recalls of the production, for which he lost 40 pounds and waxed his body, spending time on and off set wearing the same clothes that Rayon—the HIV-positive trans woman he played—would. "I was in a very frail, very vulnerable place."

'House of Gucci': Why Jared Leto Keeps Saying 'Boof!' - Vulture

'House of Gucci': Why Jared Leto Keeps Saying 'Boof!'.

Posted: Fri, 26 Nov 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]

When you're in a rock band, you sell merch. But, no, I have too much respect for Alessandro and the team at Gucci to ever pretend that I'm a designer so far. House of Gucci is currently available to watch in theaters.

Leto stars in Sony/Marvel’s Morbius next and tells us that Tron 3 is happening, with a script set to be delivered quite soon. Sure, every actor strives and yearns for such high standards, but Leto outstrips many in his transformation into pudgy fashion designer Paolo Gucci in MGM’s Ridley Scott movie House of Gucci, the one Gucci who like Rodney Dangerfield, just couldn’t get respect. When Patrizia gets rejected by shy Maurizio’s traditional and haughty father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons)—he quietly shames Patrizia’s lack of cultural finesse—she finds a welcome ally in Uncle Aldo (Al Pacino). He is the quality and class-insistent Rodolfo’s calculating brother, with a commercialist attitude that differs from his sibling’s when it comes to reviving Gucci’s flailing image in the ‘70s and rising above the brand’s whispered-about financial hardship. Like the rest of the star-studded cast — Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani, Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci and Al Pacino as Aldo Gucci — Leto lived as much as possible in character during shooting. “We usually apply makeup on set, but Jared wanted us to apply this at a separate location.

I think when people saw the trailer, they weren’t just paying attention to the makeup — they saw his characteristics, which were really believable. Because I’m completely fucking crazy, I suppose. I think to do this, you have to be a little nutty. There are harder jobs in the world than being an actor, but it does have its unique set of pressures — mostly psychological. I wanted to be a visual artist, a painter. I studied visual art and found photography, then film, and I dropped out of school.