Baz
Luhrmann has essentially made two movies: the first half showcases the Moulin Rouge director’s flair for the
ostentatious and the gaudy (much like Jay Gatsby himself), and the second half
which favors substance over style. You can practically feel the raucous and rowdy party scenes pulsing with life and
energy, but that spirit (and, for the most part, the ‘20s-meets-2000s
soundtrack) is absent from the latter half, which simply needs to move through
the rest of the plot, leaving pivotal characters like Henry Gatz noticeably
absent.
To say
that this incarnation of Gatsby is
the best filmed adaptation isn’t saying much, as the three that preceded it
were marred by taking too many liberties with the source material (’49),
horrendous casting (with the exception of Robert Redford, ’74) and all-around
flatness (with the exception of Paul Rudd, ’00). Leonardo DiCaprio excels as
Gatsby in all his Brooks Brothers glory, and Tobey Maguire surprises as the
wide-eyed Nick. The real-life buddies carry the emotional weight of the film,
as Carey Mulligan’s Daisy isn’t given much to do besides bat her eyelashes and
weep into shirts. Joel Edgerton gives Tom Buchanan the earnest toughness that
the character demands, but needs to lose the John Waters moustache in order to
be taken seriously (if Tom can be
taken seriously; after all, he is the
polo player).
Luhrmann’s
device for establishing first-person narration will prove anathema to Gatsby purists (no spoilers), mostly
because it’s unnecessary; plenty of films feature voice-over narration that
doesn’t need explaining. Yes, the character of Nick is at times very much an
outsider-looking-in like Fitzgerald, but Nick’s writer persona in this film is wholly
unnecessary and the framing device feels artificial at best, a cop out at
worst.
That
said, there are subtle touches that nod knowingly to the faithful. To wit: the
Old West décor of Gatsby’s study harks back to his mentor Dan Cody’s heritage
as the “pioneer debauchee”; also, Daisy’s line about Gatsby resembling the cool-looking
man in the shirt advertisement is given slightly more weight when we see an
Arrow Shirts ad in Times Square featuring a man who looks strikingly like
Gatsby. They’re both nice acknowledgments of Fitzgerald’s fully-realized world
of the novel.
All
told, it’s a good film and a solid adaptation. Some of Fitzgerald’s language
gets lost in translation, and it’s questionable whether lines like “I can’t
describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport” were
meant to be uttered aloud or simply allowed to live on the page. If and when
the novel is made into a film again, it’d be interesting to see how someone
like Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Sense
& Sensibility) or Joe Wright (Atonement,
Anna Karenina) would handle it. Less pomp and circumstance, likely, but perhaps
that’s exactly what Gatsby demands.
