Baz Luhrmann is known for many things, but subtlety is not one of
them, so don’t be surprised when the Moulin
Rouge! director steamrolls The Great
Gatsby’s delicate charms into a
malaise of emptiness and absurdity.
Not that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece wasn’t asking for it,
because it was, with its pages and pages of decadent parties, romping starlets and
— to use Fitzy’s own words — “… a universe of ineffable gaudiness …” I guess we
should all be happy that Michael Bay didn’t direct it with Teen Mom stars in a nightclub with one
of those bra-festooned moose heads above the bar. It was rather odd, though, to
watch it all in pointless 3D with those stupid glasses dimming the picture and
cutting into the corners of the screen. I would have rather seen it projected
onto the floor of a roller rink with wheeled feet gliding through the picture.
Don’t say you don’t get your money’s worth, though: every penny
of your admission is dumped into a cannon and shot into your face for the
film’s entire 142-minute running. It's visual opulence exploding from the screen. The whole thing just screams “summer
blockbuster,” right down to the mindless editing and action. The photography is
an especially beautiful mess. Luhrmann’s swirling, swooping and spastic camera
lovingly and playfully dances around Gatsby’s parties as if its hyper-glance
were endorsing the decadence that the book is clearly so cautious about. As
silly as much of the film is, and as awful as most of the acting, it’s that
thematic disconnect from book to movie that is ultimately the undoing of
Luhrmann’s tragically misguided re-telling of Fitzgerald’s classic.
It follows the novel rather closely, even as it jettisons away
from the mood and tone of the narrator’s words. The narrator is Nick Carraway
(Tobey Maguire) and we pick up with him at some kind of asylum, where his fits
of depression and insomnia have kept him plugging away at his memories of Jay
Gatsby, his wealthy world-traveled neighbor on the shores of New York ’s West Egg. Gatsby (Leonardo
DiCaprio), a virtuosic enigma to Manhattan ’s
elite, throws these extravagant parties that everyone shows up to without
invitations. Everyone except Nick, who gets a hand delivered invite from snappy-dressed butler who gives him access into Gatsby’s glitzy world of epic
soirees, sailboats, fancy cars and an endless array of hedonistic fantasies.
But all Gatsby, the man who has everything, wants is Nick’s married
cousin Daisy, who lives across the bay on East Egg, behind a dock with a green
light that sorrowfully blinks at Gatsby through his bedroom window. This green
light is featured in Fitzgerald’s text, and is now universally acknowledged as
a metaphor for something desirous but largely out of reach. Luhrmann uses the
metaphor the way a chef tenderizes meat: violently with a spiked mallet. By the
end of the movie, I was so sick of that green light that escaping the light’s
incessant blinking was my own personal green-light moment.
Daisy is played coolly by Carey Mulligan, who seems to drift in
and out of the movie like those big gauzy curtains that so frequently blow out
windows in what seems like every scene. The book paints her as more of a tragic
figure, yet here she’s simply painfully undecided, like a person standing in a
grocery store debating between 2 percent and skim. I felt sorry for her, not
because she loved her husband — the insufferable Tom Buchanan, played by
Australian actor Joel Edgerton — and
Gatsby at the same time, but because she was cluelessly lost in Luhrmann’s
ultra-kinetic disemboweling of Fitzgerald’s sumptuous work.
Even worse off is Maguire, whose acting here is as atrocious as
anything he’s ever done. I hate to beat up on actors in reviews, but I’m
continuously shocked that he stars in so many films, including big blockbusters
like this. Every performance is wooden and stale, from Pleasantville to Spider-Man. He just looks so awkward and formal. Listening to him narrate Gatsby —
from those first famous lines (“In my younger and more vulnerable years …”) to
the intoxicating and perfect last pages — is excruciatingly painful. Luckily,
DiCaprio has enough chops to steal the show when he can. His Jay Gatsby is much
deeper and layered than I expected, and I never tired of his lightly accented name-calling
(“Good night, old sport”) and his peckish obsession over Daisy. He has a rather
wonderful little moment of embarrassment with a broken clock that I enjoyed
immensely.
The sets, locations and costumes are splendid as well, as is
Jay-Z’s anachronistic hip-hop soundtrack, although I would have loved some more
era-appropriate jazz and big band music. All in all, though, The Great Gatsby is a mediocre film of a
flawless novel, which isn’t the first time that has happened, nor the last. I
think Luhrmann got lost in its setting instead of its themes. This is
especially clear in an early scene with Nick, Tom and Tom’s mistress. The
camera flings through pillow feathers, splashing alcohol, against the silky
undergarments of dancers, out a window to a trumpeter, and up into the heavens
to admire a city’s beating heart lighting up the night sky. Luhrmann is in love
with the world, but not the characters who cry at its foulness. It’s as if he
doesn’t really understand the novel enough to comprehend its intricacies.
I just hope the movie, as beautiful and stupid as it is, inspires
a new generation of readers to seek out Fitzgerald’s work. They’ll discover
that Luhrmann’s film looked fantastic, but lacked the best parts of The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
words.
