Review: 'House of Gucci' is trashy and campy, with a larger-than-life central performance by Lady Gaga

Like the knockoff merchandise by which most people know the brand, director Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci” is a gaudy, garish, tasteless exercise in excess — and, yet, I can’t say I wasn’t entertained.

There’s a lot to be said for camp value, and Lady Gaga’s central performance delivers that by the truckload. In this based-on-a-true-story crime drama, Lady G plays Patrizia Reggiani, who is introduced here in Milan, 1978, as an accountant for her father’s trucking firm. Patrizia aims for the good life, though, which is why she and a friend are at a ritzy party where she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), a member of the family behind the Gucci fashion label.

Patrizia and Maurizio fall in love, but his father, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), is suspicious of anyone from the lower classes circling around the family fortune. But Patrizia charms the old man, while also consulting a TV psychic, Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek), who provides pearls of encouragement about following her heart and making good things come to her.

Rodolfo runs Gucci with his brother, Aldo (Al Pacino), whose main contribution to the business is slapping the company’s double-G logo on coffee mugs and other cheap merchandise. When Rodolfo dies, Aldo encourages Maurizio to be his second-in-command — bypassing Aldo’s buffoon of a son, Paolo, played by Jared Leto under a ton of prosthetics. Paolo fancies himself a fashion designer, though his designs are so garish that Aldo fears they would ruin the Gucci reputation.

Maurizio isn’t a strong business leader, and Patrizia is quick to fill the managerial vacuum. Soon, Patrizia is appealing to Paolo’s vanity to trap him into selling his share of the family’s stock — a power play that puts her and Maurizio in firm control of the company. That’s the first of many twists of the tale, in a story that includes infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, double-dealing and, eventually, a murder.

Scott, on the heels of his powerful medieval drama “The Last Duel,” goes over the top through much of “House of Gucci,” with every plot point and ‘80s needle drop coming together like an 18-car pile-up. The script — by Becky Johnston (“The Prince of Tides”) and Roberto Bentivegna (his first screenplay credit), adapting Sara Gay Forden’s book on the case — dances perilously close to comedy, a parody of “The Godfather” where every man in the Corleone family is a Fredo.

Driver gives a solid, understated performance, which means he’s completely lost amid this gaggle of scenery chewers. It says a lot when Pacino doesn’t give the biggest, hammiest performance in a movie, but he wasn’t conjuring with Leto pulling out the stops to play the balding, heavy-set Paolo with the aid of a talented make-up team and a series of ugly track suits.

Gaga, in her first leading role since her breakout turn in “A Star Is Born,” struggles with finding the humanity in the cartoonish depiction of Patrizia, as she cycles through several of the deadly sins — lust, avarice, envy, pride and wrath — largely unchecked. Clearly Scott has told Gaga to go big or go home, and she goes big in every scene, until the law of diminishing returns takes her and the movie down. But it’s a wild ride along the way.

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‘House of Gucci’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 24, in theaters. Rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence. Running time: 157 minutes.