The problems with this movie are many and I won’t even begin to try parsing them all, because who has time for that? But one of the biggest things working against it is the screenplay, which purports to be about the marriage of Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci and the eventual assassination of the latter by the former. I barely know anything about the real-world events that inspired the film but I know enough to know screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna couldn’t be bothered to get any of it right.

Mind you, that’s not always a bad thing. Spencer is evidence you can concoct a wholly fictional story about real-world personas and still create a gripping film. Johnston and Bentivegna did not. They apparently had no idea what they intended to convey in terms of meaning or narrative momentum, nor the passage of time. 

You could forgive some of that if the acting were better, but if you manage to pull a bad performance out of Adam Driver, you’ve done something horribly wrong. My first inclination was to say that Driver comes across as if he’s slogging through a bad SNL sketch, but I’ve seen him slog through some bad SNL sketches before. He was pretty good at it. 

Lady Gaga, meanwhile, seems to have been given the impression she landed the starring role in a trashy telenovela that would ultimately be dubbed in Russian; somebody forgot to tell Jeremy Irons that Rodolfo Gucci wasn’t an Englishman; Al Pacino, who plays Aldo Gucci, apparently intended to wander onto the set of the latest Scorsese gangster pic but took a left turn at Albuquerque; and a wholly unrecognizable Jared Leto . . . hell, I don’t even know where to begin with that one. I think maybe he was trying to audition for a sequel to the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Had he looked straight into the camera and exclaimed, “Mamma mia! That’s a spicy-uh meat-uh-ball-uh,” I wouldn’t have batted an eye. If there hadn’t been a director present on set—if someone merely turned on a camera and walked out of the room, then prompted the actors to stroll by and deliver their lines based on their own instincts—I think every one of them would have turned in infinitely better performances than what we’ve ended up with.

The one person who seems to have understood the assignment is cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, who shot the movie on an Arri Alexa Mini LF cameras, with Panavision 65 Vintage Series lenses for the most part. It’s a lovely image, captured at 4.5K and finished in a 4K DI, packed with pitch-perfect contrasts and oodles of detail. The color timing does seem a bit odd at times, occasionally exhibiting a sumptuously warm vintage-like patina while at other times seeming like you’re looking out a window, and there’s no real consistency to these shifts. Still, Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR10 presentation is flawless, so much so that you might be inclined to load the movie up and let it play with the sound off while you’re doing anything more interesting. 

You won’t be missing much with the sound off. Despite having a Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix, the soundtrack is a cluttered and messy affair that almost seems like someone tried to cram as much into the front three channels as possible on a dare. As a result, dialogue intelligibility suffers at times. Not that it matters. Even the soundtrack music is a pile of anachronisms assembled so inartfully that it infuriated me, and I love a good anachronistic needle drop when done competently with a hint of intentionality. 

I guess what I’m saying is, you can safely avoid House of Gucci unless you simply loathe Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, or Jared Leto and want to see them humiliate themselves. If any other filmmaker turned in a movie this irredeemable, they would spend the rest of their career shooting commercials for local flea-market malls.