Review by Pamela
Zoslov
The news that
Australian director Baz Luhrmann was making yet another adaptation of F.
Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY raised a familiar dread.
What would the tasteless showman responsible for MOULIN ROUGE
do to Fitzgerald's slender, elegiac Jazz Age novel? The trailer for
the film, a high-decibel mash-up featuring a robotic version of that
well known 1920s ditty “So Happy Together” by the Turtles, did
little to reassure me about what would certainly be an ugly assault
on literature – “The Great Ghastly.” And in 3D, no less.
It's easy to feel
protective about Fitzgerald, a writer too fragile to live very long.
I was dismayed in 2008 that a delicate short story like “The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had been inflated by David Fincher into a massive
special-effects epic. Gatsby occupies an even more special
place in American literature. Familiar to every schoolchild, it has
been called the “great” novel everyone has read, in comparison to
Ulysses, the “great” novel no one has read.
Gatsby is
also famously difficult to adapt to the screen. The first Gatsby
film, apart from a forgotten silent, was a bland affair in 1949 starring Alan Ladd. The second, in 1974, was a dull, plushy disaster
starring Robert Redford. The book, an interior reminiscence of Gatsby
and his milieu by Nick Carraway, may be impossible to capture outside
of the covers of a book, since so much of its meaning depends on the
writing. Truman Capote, hired to write the scenario for the '74 film,
complained that the story was too elusive to adapt to the screen.
According to Truman's biographer, Gerald Clarke, Fitzgerald himself,
working in Hollywood, had similar difficulties adapting novels. “It's
all beautiful when you read it,” Fitzgerald said, “but when you
write it down plain, it's like a week in the nuthouse.” Capote's
screenplay was rejected by the studios-- strangely for being “just
like the book” -- and Francis Ford Coppola got the job.
It is one thing,
for example, for Fitzgerald to describe Gatsby as having “one of
those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that
you may come across four or five times in life.” It is quite
another to see Gatsby in the person of a goofily grinning Leonardo
DiCaprio, set heroically against a sky filled with fireworks,
accompanied the swelling orchestration of Gershwin's “Rhapsody in
Blue.” This is meant to be impressive, but the effect is merely
comical. I don't know what it is that makes casting directors
continue to hire DiCaprio, whose juvenile looks never satisfactorily
matured into adulthood, in period roles that require him to
impersonate formidable historical figures (Howard Hughes, J. Edgar
Hoover). His face in no way suggests the handsome would-be aristocrat
Jay Gatsby, and because the plot turns on Gatsby's magnetic appeal to
the narrator, Nick Carraway, and Gatsby's lost love Daisy Buchanan,
that is a critical flaw. (The less said about DiCaprio's lamentable
accent, “Old Sport,” the better.)
It's the casting,
surprisingly, not Luhrmann's grandiosity, that is the petard on which
this Gatsby is hoist. Some roles are better cast. Tobey
Maguire makes an acceptable Nick Carraway, far more attractive than
Sam Waterston in the 1974 film; his reading of Fitzgerald's prose in
the voiceover narration is particularly agreeable. Australian actor
Joel Edgerton sinks his teeth into the part of Daisy's husband Tom
Buchanan. His spirited embrace of the role makes the bigoted,
swaggering philanderer the film's most sympathetic character. This
cannot have been Fitzgerald's intent.
Luhrmann's GATSBY
is a little schizoid, on the one side unusually faithful to
Fitzgerald's text, and on the other all flash and showmanship.
Luhrmann and his co-scenarist, Craig Pearce, have such high regard
for Fitzgerald's prose that they've incorporated the very words into
the film's 3D design. The words float across the screen as Carraway
writes them, and hover before our eyes that we might savor them. A
nice touch, and one of this film's interesting uses of the generally
supererogatory 3D medium.
The script
introduces as a framing device the idea that Nick, several years
after the events in the novel, has retired, not, as in the book, to the
Midwest where he was raised, but to a sanitarium following an
alcoholic breakdown (or “crack-up,” Luhrmann explained in a
recent interview, borrowing the title of Fitzgerald's book based on
his own breakdown). The device allows Nick to tell a listener, the
psychiatrist, his recollections about Gatsby. The psychiatrist
suggests that Nick, who has told him of his collegiate literary
aspirations, write it all down. It's a clever way of turning a
first-person narrative into drama, with the narration maintained
throughout the film, preserving Fitzgerald's exquisite poetic descriptions.
The movie works
best when Fitzgerald's words and the often stunning visual collages
and montages are front and center. But when Luhrmann's predilection
for excess takes over, things are bigger, louder and depressingly
literal. So we have not just the suggestion, as in the book, of
Gatsby and Daisy's affair, but a scene showing them cavorting in bed.
And when Gatsby, nervously meeting Daisy at Nick's house, awkwardly
knocks over a clock, in the book it echoes his naïve
belief that it's possible to stop time and re-create the past. When
DiCaprio does it, he just looks like a klutz.
Then there's Gatsby's gleaming West Egg estate, site of all those
lavish, decadent parties. In this movie, it's not just a big mansion,
it's a gargantuan, digitally created palace in the sky. And rather
than just telling us, as in the novel, of the death of Tom's
mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), we actually see her smashed
hideously against the windshield of Gatsby's speeding yellow car (a
Duesenberg rather than the Rolls Royce of the novel).
DiCaprio, a shade
too old for the role, is an uncomfortable fit for Fitzgerald's
wistful dreamer and self-invented aristocrat, about whom Nick says, “there
was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the
promises of life...an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it
is not likely I shall ever find again.” This movie Gatsby's dashed
hopes do not evoke sadness or pity, because he is a cardboard figure.
(Carey Mulligan, similarly, is too coarse to embody the gossamer
Daisy.) Nick is ambivalent about Gatsby, seeing in his romantic
visions and their destruction the trajectory of the American dream, a
boat crushed against the rocks of greed and corruption, as well as by
selfish rich people like Tom and Daisy. As in the book, the film has
Nick telling Gatsby, who gallantly tries to protect Daisy from the
consequences of her destructiveness, that he's better than people
like the Buchanans. But he doesn't seem particularly noble, he just
seems like a nitwit. DiCaprio to one side, is there anyone who
could successfully incarnate Gatsby? Or is Jay Gatsby best left a
figure of the imagination?
Strangely, the
elements of this movie that portended disaster, like the
effects-laden, orgiastic party sequences (confetti and streamers seem
to fall onto the audience), gyrating dancers and Jay- Z's
contemporary music, are fairly palatable, as are the gleaming
cinematography and the delectable 3D visual effects incorporating
newsreel-style period footage and attractive sepia-toned flashbacks.
Though often in questionable taste, Luhrmann's extravagant spectacle
adds a mythic dimension to Nick's recollections, which makes sense
because Gatsby, though disgraced, is idealized in Nick's memory.
Every generation
gets the Gatsby it deserves, and Luhrmann's top-heavy, flashy
digitalized spectacle is suitably aimed at attention-challenged ,
sensation-seeking millennials. Its saving grace is its unexpected
reverence for the written word. 2 and 3/4 stars out of 4.
Wife dragged to this. I liked it more than Pam did, though it did take until the third act for Mr. Luhrmann's famous visual histrionics to settle down in favor of drama. Any reason Tobey Maguire has to look so much like Pee Wee Herman in his early scenes, though? ...But what really appealed was afterwards, seeing a group of young moviegoers in the lobby, who'd obviously attended in a group, talking excitedly about the picture, its characters and the original novel, with the same enthusiasm young hellions typically applied to Bella/Edward/Jacob. Gave me hope for American culture...unless those were Canadian kids, just in town to look at Seymour Avenue.
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