The Guccis Are Really Not Happy About ‘House of Gucci’
The New York Times
When artistic license collides with reality, which one wins?
The fractious Gucci family, whose internecine power struggles famously helped it lose the company Guccio Gucci founded in 1921, has finally found common cause once again.
The reason for the family’s reunification: “House of Gucci,” the 24-carat camp drama framed in pigskin about the murder of the family scion Maurizio Gucci. The film, starring Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani, the spurned wife who commissioned the hit, and Adam Driver as Maurizio, opened in the United States last week, bringing 10 members of the dynasty back together to protest what they believe is a distortion of history, the family name and the brand they made.
The descendants of Aldo Gucci, one of the three sons of Guccio, and the man who turned the Florentine leather brand into a global sensation (and who is played in the film by Al Pacino as a sort of rumpled, prosciutto-spewing American cartoon of a Mafioso) issued a statement, reading: “Although the film claims to tell the ‘true story’ of the family, the narrative is anything but accurate, depicting Aldo Gucci — president of the company for 30 years — and other members of the Gucci family who were the protagonists of well-documented events, as hooligans, ignorant and insensitive to the world around them.”
