The whole thing sounds like a Chico Marx convention. Pacino, like most of the cast, is required to deliver his lines in English with an Italian accent-or, rather, in an “Italian” accent, with the intonations ladled on like ragù. He can embrace one person and make it look like a group hug. It’s as if the blind colonel in “Scent of a Woman” (1992), the cop in “Heat” (1995), and Jimmy Hoffa in “The Irishman” (2019) were joining forces and saying to one another: “Michael Corleone? Interesting guy, good businessman, but, you know, a little on the quiet side.” Aldo Gucci marks the climax of that process. It’s hard to escape the impression that the second half of Pacino’s career has been one long rebuke, conscious or otherwise, to the cool intensity of his early years. Aldo Gucci-the father of Paolo and the brother of Rodolfo-is played by Al Pacino at maximum bluster. There are times when “House of Gucci” becomes a kind of actors’ contest, with the stars lining up to salt the ham. To be fair, Leto is scarcely alone in his quest for excess. So hard does he strain to be larger than life that he’s no longer lifelike at all. Here, as Paolo, Leto is a bubbling stew of latex, wigs, and outsized gestures. He’s like a chef who insists on cooking your dinner before your very eyes. Two, because of the Jared Leto rule, familiar to many moviegoers: at no point, when he is performing, must we be allowed to forget the vast and dedicated effort which he has brought to that performance. His iconoclasm, therefore, carries no weight whatsoever. One, because Paolo has already been established, against hot competition, as the movie’s preëminent doofus: a man bereft of intelligence and taste, who thinks nothing of wearing a suit made from damson corduroy. Why, then, is this moment not as shocking as Scott would like it to be? Two reasons. In the realms of international allure, where beautiful people are draped in beautiful things, no more heinous act of sacrilege could be imagined. This is the scarf that Rodolfo once created for Grace Kelly. There is a moment in the new Ridley Scott film, “House of Gucci,” when Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto) takes a scarf designed by his uncle Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), casts it to the ground, and urinates on it.
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