Movie Review: The Great Gatsby
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
This should have been a massive, misguided headache: stranger to subtlety Baz Luhrmann, director of the effervescent musical melodrama Moulin Rouge! and the guns a-blazing version of Romeo & Juliet decides to lend his stylized, campy sensibility to a 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dog-eared, hot jazz and lost dreams classic The Great Gatsby, soundtracked by Jay-Z to make sure the kids who are cheating on their book report have some flash and beats to keep them interested. Anchored by an appropriately flinty performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in another in a line of obsessively romantic, tragic character roles, supported by Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke, and Isla Fisher, Luhrmann’s gamble is surprisingly faithful and does more to evoke the poetic reverie of Fitzgerald’s most famous work than the handful of stiff attempts we have seen in the past.
Ah, the past – the book seems to wave farewell to the Roaring Twenties right in the midst of its peak moment – for all the champagne and illicit trysts depicted with the author’s singular purple prose, the story of the heartbroken bootlegger Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio) and his love for former flame Daisy Buchanan (Mulligan), now married to a lummox across the bay in old-moneyed Long Island Sound, The Great Gatsby is a regretful, somber, and interior book that wouldn’t seemingly lend itself to Luhrmann’s dazzle-pop treatment. That the film is a dashing feat of sumptuous art-deco design and that the characters radiate under their bob wigs, flapper dresses, and sharp tuxes was to be expected; but Luhrmann is often criticized for his penchant for farce and broad emotions – how would that play when things get serious between the music video interludes playing fast and loose with ideas about what a platinum-collar soiree looked like in the late 1920s?
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It’s not realism I demand from this sort of postmodern affront to tastefulness – enjoy your gaudy set pieces and hip-hop trappings – but none of it matters without honoring the thoughtful tone of the original text. I still don’t like all the manic comic business that inextricably links Luhrmann with Australian movie culture – his Gatsby bumbles his way preparing for the first long-awaited meeting with Daisy; a scene that should be played with dignity is undone by the director’s spendthrift decor and zany staging. Too much crowding into a scene has the negative effect of distancing us from the central romantic dilemma – Gatsby’s seduction of Daisy away from Tom.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in “The Great Gatsby.” Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture – © 2013 Bazmark Film III Pty Limited.
That urge to go too big is of course best served in the dizzying party sequences – “master’s canvases” of inoffensive Bacchanalia that look like the opening of the Grammy Awards – blues and pinks bouncing off diamond light take us into the realm of pure fantasy and play up to the worst of our material instincts. Any point made about the emptiness of money versus emotional fulfillment is buried deep in this showy and shallow version of The Great Gatsby that still charms by the sheer force of good performances and a director who makes beautiful, distracted films but would make a terrible school-teacher.
Gregory Fichter
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