House of Gucci: Ridley Scott's gaga fashion drama is an overlong, unfocused mess

House of Gucci (R13, 158 minutes) Directed by Ridley Scott **½

House of Gucci does get off to a great start.

Lady Gaga – Stefani Germanotta to her mum – is genuinely terrific as Patrizia Reggiani, the woman who will marry Maurizio Gucci, scion of the great family and presumably one of the most eligible bachelors in Italy.

As the young Gucci, Adam Driver is also reliably good, if a little over-familiar now, playing Maurizio as a shy and faintly awkward young man who slowly blossoms to become cheery and slightly more confident as he moves away from the predatory Reggiani.

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But all of that is in the future. At first, these two have to meet, to fall besottedly for each other and to marry.

House of Gucci and Ridley Scott – somehow managing to release this behemoth in the same year as the equally turgid and weighty The Last Duel – get through these early scenes with promise and dignity intact. At the early-morning preview I slunk into, the prospect of two more hours of Gucci still to come didn't seem too arduous.

And then the rest of the film turned up.

First out of the blocks is Jeremy Irons, heroically miscast as Rodolfo Gucci – dad to Maurizio and one of the two brothers who own most of the company. Irons can be a brilliant presence. But here, apparently coated in cornflour and with rings under his eyes that look left over from a remake of Nosferatu, Irons struggles to be heard over his own make-up. Worse, it quickly becomes obvious that Irons can't “do” an Italian accent to save himself.

What comes out of his mouth sounds exactly like every other Jeremy Irons performance, ever. But with an “a” added to the end of a few words. It's odd and strangely endearing.

Next up are Al Pacino and Jared Leto, as father and son Aldo and Paolo Gucci. Pacino is fine. He can play these roles in his sleep and sometimes appears to do so here. But Leto is a whole other plate of linguini.

Somewhere inside a fat suit and a kilo of prosthetic putty, Leto is unrecognisable as he scrabbles and scuttles through his early scenes as the son who believes he has a talent for design.

For whatever reason, Leto has given Paulo a voice like a clarinet attached to an exhaust pipe. His vowels soar and crash quite independently of anything the dialogue is meant to convey.

Enunciating like Celine Dion caught in a bear trap, Leto goes toe-to-toe with Pacino, warbling like a man possessed. While Pacino, hardly known for restraint in his own career, can only stare in disbelief at what the younger actor is giving him to work with.

Whenever Leto appears, this alleged tragedy and drama – based on things that happened to actual people – dissolves into farce.

For a film set in the world of fashion, House of Gucci also has oddly little to say about the business and the personalities who drive it.

Scott seems caught between a fascination with this world and contempt for the people who inhabit it, but there is no sense of the industry here. The film unfolds in dining rooms, offices and cars, almost never in a studio or on a factory floor. We only briefly see a couple of catwalks, the first to demonstrate that Aldo is not a genius and, a second, much later, to show us the late-arriving designer Tom Ford – is.

The role Ford played in rescuing Gucci could be the guts of a pretty good film. But with Ford a filmmaker himself now, and a more efficient and eloquent one than Scott has been for years, maybe it was professional caution that kept him so sidelined in this story.

Trimmed of an hour, with more of Gaga and Driver and less of everything else, this could have been a watchable slice of campy fun. As it is, House of Gucci is an overlong, unfocused mess that also happened to make me laugh louder than any film I've seen this year. It's just a shame it's not being marketed as a comedy.

House of Gucci is now screening in cinemas nationwide.