The Great Gatsby review

“Even Gatsby could happen,” Nick Carraway says while riding into New York with the title character, and it’s true—even Gatsby could happen, and it almost does.

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.