Gucci · Garvey · Glass
And lawsuits, and longreads
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Pick your poison (…not literally; a poisoning is not on offer, technically): tax evasion, forgery, conspiracy to commit murder — House Of Gucci’s got something for everyone. (Including people who think using Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass” as a symbolic sound drop needs to be literally outlawed for at least the next five years.)
The story
That’s the problem with Ridley Scott’s eagerly awaited…well, I don’t know what to call it, actually. “Docudrama,” I suppose, but “dawdling dog’s breakfast that lacks the courage of its convictions and wastes half a dozen top-notch performances trying to do too much” gets closer. House Of Gucci isn’t boring, although it’s much too long; it just doesn’t know what its story is. And any story it picked would have worked. The corporate-malfeasance fire that created the phoenix that was the Tom Ford era? Sure. Al Pacino and Jared Leto as the father-son Guccis who created that management crisis do not give subtle performances — Leto in particular is doing some left-field Cheffrey Tamboyardee thing that may not “work” but is nonetheless riveting — but, unlike the script, they commit.
The “Italian Betty Broderick” plot centered on Lady Gaga and Adam Driver? We’ve seen it done before, and better, to my mind; Gaga is fine given how lazy the script is in that section of the film, and Driver is incredibly charming in the first segment of their story, but if the writing had spent a little more time on their characters’ evolutions, it really could have played. Hell, tell the entire thing from the perspective of Salma Hayek’s wry TV psychic! Or cast her as Patrizia, because there is a broadness to the Americans’ rendering of continental shrugs and eye-rolls that doesn’t quite go (I thought more than once of how much better Penelope Cruz’s Donatella was than this in that regard). Gaga has one scene that will probably win her the Oscar, smoking and seething while Pacino’s Aldo blathers on about how Gucci is whatever he says it is; again, she’s laboring against a current of shittish wigs and recycled dialogue, but she’s good. Certainly she’s not the problem.
The problem is that Sofia Coppola should have directed House Of Gucci okay hear me out! because Coppola will take something like “what if Marie Antoinette, but also the Delia*s catalog” and play it all the way out without hedging her bets. It doesn’t always go the way you hope, but she picks a path and stays on it. As is, House Of Gucci wants to be a story about corporate machinations and marital disintegration and fashion dynasties that also doesn’t want not to be for anyone who’s not interested in any of those, so you get a 157-minute quilt of all three — that also does a two-year time jump from the hit on Maurizio to Patrizia telling the judge at her arraignment to address her as “Signora Gucci,” and then the movie ends, so on some level it doesn’t want itself classed as true crime, even though that’s yet another story path the script could have taken, but couldn’t bring itself to walk down with its eyes open.
It’s not a boring almost-three hours. I liked seeing hints of past movies and characters in Pacino’s performance, from Michael Corleone to Tony D’Amato, and I think that was a longshot casting that really paid off. Lady Gaga isn’t uniformly brilliant but watching her thinking as an actor is interesting, at least to me. So is it worth your time? I don’t know that I’d pay full theater price for it, but I finished it, grumbled to myself that I’d never get that three hours back, and then talked my husband’s ear off about all the structural issues for like twenty minutes at dinner — so yeah, I think it probably is. House Of Gucci overall is a mess, but it’s a compelling mess. — SDB
If you’d rather just dig into the true-crime part of the Gucci dish, Roku has a documentary for that. It’s called Fashion Victim, and it’s free on the Roku app/website even if you don’t have the device. I don’t know if this one’s worth your time either, but the amount of said time invested is a fraction of that of House Of Gucci (the thing’s only 48 minutes), so if you’re looking to just-the-facts-ma’am the case, give it a look. — SDB
Not sure how the Gucci family feels about Fashion Victim…but they’re definitely not happy about House Of Gucci. Heirs of Aldo Gucci have objected to the portrayal of Aldo and others as “thugs,” but their main objection is with the centering of Patrizia Reggiani as a sympathetic figure. From THR:
The Gucci family took particular umbrage with Ridley Scott’s portrayal of Reggiani in House of Gucci “as a victim,” an opinion they claim was reinforced by statements that [Lady] Gaga and other castmembers made during the promotion of the movie.
The family statement said it was “mystifying” that a woman convicted of instigating the murder of her ex-husband would be portrayed as “a victim trying to survive in a male corporate culture.”
Their more general point about failing to focus on the actual victim is taken, but in the film’s defense — sort of; this is actually a criticism — I don’t think Patrizia is cast as a victim of sexist time and circumstance. If anything, she’s portrayed as a striver who overplays her hand vis-a-vis the internecine battles she married into, but as I noted above, the writing doesn’t do a good enough job on Patrizia’s or Maurizio’s transformations from loving and supportive young spouses to hardened schemers to say that it’s insulting. Then again, I’m not the one being insulted, and the family told Italian wire service ANSA that they “reserve the right to take every initiative (necessary) to protect their name and image and those of their loved ones.”
The family also basically called Al Pacino a little fugster in an earlier statement, and Ridley Scott seems not to be worried about the veiled lawsuit threats (and I can’t imagine MGM didn’t bulletproof itself against libel/tort actions years ago). We’ll see what happens. — SDB
We don’t need to buy any Gucci ourselves…but it would be nice to pay our freelancers a little more! Your paid subscriptions help a great deal with that stuff, and with funding subscriptions to Air Mail, Hulu, and other true-crime purveyors. Give yourself
or a loved one
the gift of Best Evidence today! — SDB
I would say that I regret to inform you that Stephen Glass is at it again, but 1) I have no regrets, the guy is fascinating and 2) it’s not nearly that simple this time. PolitiFact founder Bill Adair’s Air Mail article follows Glass after the fall, Glass coming to speak to Adair’s journalism class, and Glass’s relationship with his wife, Julie Hilden, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Hilden also had suspicious friends with crimoir bona fides:
Early on, Hilden’s friends were concerned. Melanie Thernstrom, a journalist who was a close friend of Hilden’s, recalls saying, “What? You’re going to start dating the criminals?” See anyone else, she told her friend, just not this guy.
You may recall that Thernstrom wrote Halfway Heaven (my review is here). Thernstrom now counts Glass as a friend, as Adair notes before giving an overview of Glass’s long, strange trip through the California-bar system, then arriving back at the big lie Glass perpetrated for Hilden after her diagnosis.
The piece (or, really, its editors, I suspect) may make a bit too much of the central irony here, the contrast between Glass’s second-act commitment to radical truthfulness and the commitment he upheld to the woman he loved, but it’s crisply written and moving regardless. — SDB
A few more longreads for your Monday lunch hour. Some difficult going here, content-wise, so as always, read with care for yourselves. — SDB
“Descendants of Marcus Garvey press Biden for posthumous pardon” [WaPo] // Garvey, “a revered human rights activist, newspaper owner, Black nationalist leader and orator, was known worldwide as a leader of the ‘back to Africa’ movement”; he was also convicted of mail fraud in 1923, after what seems like a determined effort by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to find any reason to deport him.
“Are you shy, or not shy?” [Boston Globe] // Former student-athletes at a Rhode Island high school say that “the body fat tests conducted by longtime basketball coach Aaron Thomas were an uncomfortable open secret” going back decades. Thomas also apparently conducted “hernia tests,” in a janitor’s closet or a small AV room near his office.
“The Woman on the Bridge” [New York Times] // Maine law enforcement tries to dot all the “i”s in an intimate-partner violence case, but after a truly bleak outcome for a victim, the feds get involved.
Chris Cuomo terminated by CNN [Deadline] // The story appears to be ongoing, but it seems Cuomo was axed not for journalistic impropriety (or not only for that) but because a colleague had come forward with a sexual-harassment claim against him.
This week on Best Evidence: Holmes abuse claims, Netflix dragon-chasing, and a past-masters podcast topic gets a documentary.
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