What I Watched This Weekend: House of Gucci and Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

 

If you see House of Gucci primarily to admire Lady Gaga's much-touted, Method-inspired performance, you won't be disappointed.  

If, however, you are hoping to indulge in a glamourous story of love gone wrong, draped in high fashion and shot in exquisite Italian locations, you might want to rethink your multiplex selection. The tragic fall of the house of Gucci, it turns out, comes down mainly to fraud, tax evasion and family members who sell off their shares - plot twists that are painfully difficult to make interesting, let alone comprehensible. Even an estimable director like Ridley Scott can't quite pull it off. As for the fashion, the only runway show we see in any detail is Tom Ford's first show for Gucci, which comes very late in the film.

House of Gucci has some good moments, primarily in its first half when Gucci heir, Maurizio (Adam Driver) and his wife, Patrizia, are wildly in love and struggling with Maurizio's indifference to his inherited wealth. Patrizia, a secretary in her middle-class father's trucking company, is canny and calculating in ingratiating herself with Maurizio's elegant, moneyed family, but also very much in love with her husband. Gaga nails the complexity in her character without hitting a single false note.  A lesser actress might have made Patrizia into a hot-headed gold digger, but Gaga makes her a little harder to get a handle on. She's conniving, but she has better business instincts than anyone born to the Gucci name, and you can feel her genuine pain in not being taken seriously.

Gaga, undeniably the films' VIP, tears into her role with full-bodied relish. You can't take your eyes off her. That she is the clear standout in a cast which also includes Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto and Salma Hayek, marks her as an actress whose continuing career should be exciting to watch. (Whereas Leto is the least compelling member of the ensemble.  Playing the family buffoon, he overacts the hell out of his role, affecting an accent that sounds more like an Italian waiter in a Bugs Bunny cartoon than any real person.)

Unfortunately, as Patrizia and Maurizio's marriage comes apart - and Gaga has less to do - the film also loses its way.  By the time she hires hitmen to assassinate her estranged husband (which should have been the dramatic high point of the film), you barely care anymore. And that's mostly because, House of Gucci is just too damn long.  At two hours and 37 minutes - especially when preceded by 25 minutes of coming attractions - it makes for one butt-numbing night at the multiplex.

Like Robert Weide, the director of Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, I discovered Vonnegut's writing at the age of 16 through his novel Breakfast of Champions and read his books near-obsessively over the next few years.  He was funny and mournful at the same time, an iconoclast who said the true things no one else would say aloud.  And he was from Indiana, which blew my young mind because he was like no one in my Hoosier experience.

Weide, best known as the Emmy-winning director of Curb Your Enthusiasm, embarked on making a documentary about Vonnegut when he was just 23, after a friendly exchange of letters with the author. That documentary, only just completed after nearly 40 years, not only presents a robust and challenging assessment of Vonnegut but also chronicles his close friendship with Weide.

There are obvious dangers when a filmmaker grows too close to his subject, not least a lack of objectivity which can too easily devolve into hagiography. Then there's the potentially problematic nature of a filmmaker who injects himself into the subject's story.  

Thankfully, Weide manages to sidestep both these potential pitfalls. Vonnegut is portrayed as far less than saintly in extensive interviews with his children (his own three, plus the four nephews he took in when his beloved sister and her husband both died in the same week). As youngsters, they were witnesses to the writer's early, struggling days when he was prone to wild mood swings with unpredictable fits of rage and anguish.  Although their adult remembrances are tempered with some forgiveness and understanding, the picture they paint is uncomfortable at best.

As for Weide's recurring presence in the film, it's clear the two men did have a genuinely close friendship as evinced by the many warm, appreciative answering machine messages the writer left for Weide over the years, all played back here.  Weide manages to make himself an inoffensive stand-in for all of us who discovered and worshipped Vonnegut as young people.  If anything, I envied Weide's friendship with Vonnegut and wished I'd been brave enough to write him a fan letter myself.

I particularly enjoyed the footage of Vonnegut in his hometown of Indianapolis, where he enjoyed a privileged and mostly happy childhood as part of a socially prominent family. (His father was an architect, whose buildings I hope are still standing in downtown Indy. The family also owned a popular chain of hardware stores.) He's seen chatting with Shortridge High School classmates at his 60th reunion, swapping World War II reminisces with the fellow veterans in his class, and he comes off as a regular Hoosier guy.

Although he dismisses the notion in one of the film's interview segments, World War II forever scarred and shaped Vonnegut's world view. As a young soldier, he was captured by the Germans and placed in a prison camp near Dresden.  After the horrific firebombing of that city, he and fellow POWs were tasked with excavating, stacking and burying the hundreds of dead bodies trapped in the rubble.  It took him years to finally come to terms with this trauma in his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five. The experience becomes a recurring touchpoint in this documentary; even the title of the film is a reference to the novel's most famous line: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

Unstuck in Time is exhaustive in scope, yet some chapters in Vonnegut's life remain mysterious. Little is said about his second marriage to photographer Jill Krementz. It's implied there was trouble in the marriage; apparently, Vonnegut lived alone in his final years. Yet the two never divorced, and Krementz herself does not go on the record here.

I can't speak for viewers who are unfamiliar with Vonnegut, but to those of us who idolized him, this film is pure heaven. It's easily the most engrossing and entertaining documentary I've seen in years.  And it sent me straight back to Vonnegut's work. With the exception of Slaughterhouse Five, which I revisited about ten years ago, I hadn't touched one of his books since college. But this morning I downloaded Breakfast of Champions to my IPad and starting reading it again for the first time since 1976.  I was stunned at how prescient it was, right from its opening chapter - how in tune with our current day its initial sentiments were.  Here's a sample from that first chapter:

"The teachers told the children that (1492) was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human being everywhere else.  There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see...

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continue to think of ordinary human beings as machines."

Wow!! I can assure you that no one said this kind of stuff out loud in 1973 - at least no one in Indiana anyway. Vonnegut was "woke" about 50 years before "woke" was anything other than the past tense of "wake."  

I think it's time for a Kurt Vonnegut revival. I can imagine young people once again embracing him, turning to his novels for a dose of sanity and humane good sense in a world where neither of those things is much in evidence.  And it's time for me to re-visit his books myself. I first read them as an unsophisticated, unworldly teen. I'd like to see how they'll hold up for me now that I'm older than Vonnegut was when he wrote most of them.

Quick Take on: Spencer

 

In Spencer, director Pablo Larrain clearly wants you to see Princess Diana as a woman trapped in an uncaring, archaic system, deprived of love and close to madness. Unfortunately the Diana of this bizarre fantasia actually comes off as a spoiled sourpuss who’s pissed off at having to spend another Christmas with the in-laws. 

Larrain doesn't do traditional biopics. His 2017 film Jackie focused in on Jacqueline Kennedy's life in the days just following her husband's assassination; it was a psychologically astute and keenly observed study of a woman in the grip of post-traumatic stress. But that film succeeded because it was rooted in actual events and had some connection to reality.

With Spencer, Larrain  and screenwriter Steven Knight have thrown objective reality out the window and turned a Christmas holiday with the royal family at Sandringham into a psychological horror film with Diana as a tormented woman losing her grip on sanity.  It's all tense, jarring string music on the soundtrack,  and castle rooms filmed to look ominous and imposing.  Even the ghost of Anne Boleyn shows up to convince Diana she is doomed. 

Anyone who's watched The Crown already knows that the Windsors are a pretty insular clan who follow an odd but firmly entrenched series of rituals with unquestioning fealty. As depicted, both in that series and in Spencer, those rituals seem fairly harmless. Is it really such a chore to eat at pre-arranged meal times, show up for an annual family photo, go to church with your mother-in-law? No one in the family comes off here as menacing or unconcerned about Diana, just a little stuffy. Even Prince Charles tries, not unkindly, to help Diana understand what she signed up for in the way of duty and sacrifice. (When he tells her she has to be able to do things she hates, that’s not being mean. That’s pretty much the definition of adulthood.)

The lesson doesn't take. Diana continues to obsess about Anne Boleyn's fate and to act out a series of petty rebellions and clueless disruptions: A refusal to show up on time for any meal. Complaining about having to exchange presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. Entreating the estate's chef to talk with her about how dreadful pheasant hunting is when that poor guy is just trying to make sure the Christmas dinner is served on time.

In real life, Diana was hurt by her reputation within the family as being unstable, and Larrain unwittingly gives credence to that characterization of the princess. In addition to the Anne Boleyn stuff, she deliberately injures herself with a wire cutter, wanders the grounds alone late at night, and deliberately leaves her curtains open while undressing  - even after she's been told that tabloid photographers with long-lensed cameras have been snapping pictures of her. 

About that pheasant hunting... Maybe it's me, but an opposition to pheasant hunting is not the hill I'd choose to die on in a quest to bring the monarchy to its knees. For one thing, it's not necessarily an aristocratic or wasteful endeavor. I grew up in an area of rural Indiana where hedgerows in the fields made for an excellent pheasant habitat. My father and uncles shot pheasants every year; I watched my mom pluck their feathers and clean their carcasses in our kitchen. My family and I ate those pheasants, too, which was helpful when the grocery budget was tight. Stag hunting, with its apparent objective of providing trophy heads to hang in castle rooms, seems far more offensive to me. But then, Peter Morgan has pretty much worked that "dying stag as metaphor for threatened monarch" to death in both The Queen and The Crown. Maybe that's why Larrain chose to focus on pheasants.

"But how is Kristen Stewart's performance as Diana?" you may be asking.  Stewart is too good an actress to be bad, but her utter lack of resemblance to the princess is jarring, especially with the memory of lookalike Emma Corrin's brilliant work on The Crown so fresh in our memories. They didn't even take the trouble to give Stewart contact lenses to transform her pale green eyes into Diana's famously big baby blues. She gets the mannerisms and voice right, however, and ultimately just about gets me on Diana's side. But not quite.

Everything we know about Diana that makes us sympathetic to her plight is missing from Larrain’s film. There is virtually no mention of the charity work to which she was so devoted and even less evidence of her famously empathetic and caring personality. Charles’ infidelity is obliquely referenced  while Diana’s extramarital affairs appear not not to have happened at all.   By limiting the action to three days at a sprawling estate and reducing the conflict to just Diana’s resistance to hoary rituals, Spencer reduces the real tragedy of its heroine’s life to an isolated episode of despair, to be solved with fast food and pop tunes in the final scene.