The Great Gatsby provides Baz Luhrmann with his perfect source material – a tragic love story perpetuated by the delusional glitz and shine of a hopeless idealist. Just like Moulin Rouge. Just like Romeo + Juliet.
Cinegoers who can’t leave F. Scott Fitzgerald at home have a hard time squaring with the blinged up, hyper-reality of Luhrmann’s world and stare aghast as perhaps their favourite novel is given the sugar-injected treatment of his direction. This is how he does film, how he always has. His style is as frivolous and obstreperous as a pop music video but betrays exactly the same flashes of authentic emotion as that throwaway medium. These pangs are what made Moulin Rouge exhilarating and why I looked forward to The Great Gatsby.
Unfortunately, for me, The Great Gatsby doesn’t quite match up to Luhrmann’s 2001 zenith. Ironically, considering the criticisms usually levelled at the Australian filmmaker, I actually think he pays too much reverence to Fitzgerald’s novel and this often nips in the bud any moment that threatens to burst into vibrancy. So characteristic is his style that it can only work when images assault the audience, daring them to keep up with the swift cutting, confusing them into giddy frenzy with a ridiculously number of unnecessary camera angles.
The film does have its moments of pupil-dilating rushes. Gratuitous mile-long crash zooms down the sides of skyscrapers or across the lake from Gatsby’s mansion to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock do raise the dopamine levels; however, the obligation to expose the steady fluency of Fitzgerald’s narrative puts the handbrake on Luhrmann’s usual hyperactivity.
The cast are generally very good, with Leonardo DiCaprio really shining at times. Since first working with Luhrmann in 1996, DiCaprio has developed into one of America’s brilliant film actors but, even so, I hadn’t expected him to get quite so close to the smile that Fitzgerald describes as ‘one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.’
To my great happiness he also lives up to another of the most important and moving scenes in the novel – his meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house. Here, in my screening, he elicited laughs and moans from a packed audience as he endearingly conveyed the desperate and pathetic frenzy of a man whose reunion with a long-lost love is going achingly unaccording to plan.
Carey Mulligan too achieves something like Daisy Buchanan with the highlight being the look on her face first time she hears that Gatsby is living just across the bay. She is not as cruel as Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanen, who I always imagine having the caprice and cruelty of a femme fatale.
Tobey Maguire’s performance is kind of bland but it doesn’t matter; it reinforces the sense of his character Nick being a spectator to wild times and counterpoints well against the wild people Nick is hanging around with. One thing I’m not on board with is the film’s decision to reinvent Nick as an alcoholic ruin of a man reminiscing about the roaring twenties and writing it down as therapy into a book, the book, The Great Gatsby.
As Maguire reads passages from the book, the text assembles itself on screen before dissolving away. This is Luhrmann admitting that his film lacks Fitzgerald’s brilliant descriptive passages and apologising for it. I’d much rather he didn’t and, instead, got on with showing us his vision. A book is a book. Not better than a film but a different medium altogether. We shouldn’t be read to in a cinema. This is the major problem of the film. Its director acts as if a film (in this case his film) needs to be the definitive version of the original text and is a failure if it loses something in translation.
The book is there for us anytime. Any adaptation is, or should be, its own reflection of the characters and themes and should follow its own integrity.
Although the film suffers because of Baz Luhrmann’s reticence to drop the homage routine, it is probably still the most idiosyncratic of all Great Gatsby’s so far and is surely worth seeing for this reason.
Jon Bates Writes 