F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the quintessential American novels, a story of love and the passage of time that transforms it into nostalgia or obsession, a story of self-made men and socialite heirs, steeped in richesse though its author-protagonist will have none of it, in any sense.
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The Great Gatsby
Directed by Baz Luhrmann |
Here, in its fifth major film adaptation, in the hands of director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge), Gatsby glows with the light of the Roaring Twenties as prosperity raced to its peak before the Great Depression, but like a lone man’s resplendent mansion, fully lit against the night, the majestic exterior gives way to disappointing emptiness within.
The year is 1922, and Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) has rented a house on Long Island after taking a job as a bond salesman in New York. His next-door neighbour is a mysterious young millionaire named Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who throws lavish parties with regularity and sometimes stares dreamily out over the water.
Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), lives across the bay with her wealthy boor of a husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton), and sets the story in motion by inviting Nick to dinner along with the golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki in a strong Hollywood debut).
Plot-wise, little has changed from the novel and so Carraway is essentially a helpless observer among movers and shakers, slowly untangling the connections between his various hosts and their various guests; he’s polite and charmingly hapless, but he has no agency and nothing at stake beyond the faint curiosity which the viewer, too – hopefully – begins to feel about Gatsby.
Lacking a conventional hero, the novel requires some alternative point of entry, so the entire story is framed as the written recollections of a middle-aged Nick Carraway, an alcoholic in a sanitarium, encouraged to jot down recollections from 1920’s Long Island as a means of easing his mind.
Partly as a result of this device, however, the abiding (and, to Nick, “sinister”) mystery of Gatsby’s identity and history which permeates the book does not translate to film in a compelling manner; instead of providing impetus to the whole narrative, it is reduced to a flaccid revelation punctuating the climax of an unorthodox romance.
DiCaprio is captivating as always, which means that a certain ineffable element of Gatsby shines from his face one way or another, but the character’s appeal and undeniable glamour manifest at the expense of depth and believability; Gatsby, the boundless – some would say foolish – optimist, comes across as incidentally shallow, sincere but foolish and unrealistic.
Carey Mulligan does her utmost to live up to the impossible fiction of Daisy, the radiant socialite, and though her delicate manner is apt, her picture-perfect features full of dramatic vitality, she can do little but pose and quip as she drowns in meticulous art direction set design too luscious for words.
Every actor contributes effectively to making the luxurious period setting believable, and much of the book’s dialogue survives intact. The narration by Nick is somewhat clumsy, particularly toward the end when typeset letters fountain out of the screen to emphasize his words, but the framing device at least motivates and justifies the inclusion of extra snippets of Fitzgerald’s prose.
The second-act reunion of Daisy and Gatsby – a long sequence driven by the characters and uninterrupted by narration – is a high point, dream-like and effortless, before the boundless, studied nostalgia sets in with calculated precision.
Whenever it forgets that at its core ought to be a critique of unfeeling opulence, which is often, Gatsby offers a seductive vision of an ethereal, high-society lifestyle amid lurid excess and endless, lavish parties whose conception seems to owe more to the formal conventions of the modern music video than to anything else.
The film’s computer-generated imagery, 3D format, and throbbing soundtrack of anachronistic pop music (selected with an eye toward this year’s charts rather than an ear toward the ‘20s) are a mean substitute for Fitzgerald’s expressive prose.
Old vintage footage used for establishing shots seems out of place alongside the saturated lushness of the other scenes, and the modern music (particularly a couple of tracks by Jay-Z, who produced the soundtrack) is likewise painfully at odds with the orchestral score and historical setting.
But amid the clamour, beneath the facade, is the story of something meaningful, if only in broad strokes. It may be a shame to see Gatsby given a treatment so thoroughly contemporary that visually it evokes the likes of 300, Sin City, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World more than anything one might describe as serious, let alone classic, but a bigger shame would be to see the story executed cheaply and lazily or forgotten altogether.
It doesn’t hit all of the lofty emotional notes it aims for, especially in closing, and the real message of The Great Gatsby threatens at every moment to disappear in a puff of firework smoke, but for all the contradictory baggage of his habitual baroque aesthetic, Luhrmann offers his own take on the material buoyed by an ambitious optimism that could not fail to be familiar to Gatsby himself.