A Good Gatsby
by Hunter IshamI remember being quite excited for this film when I first read The Great Gatsby in 2009 as a junior in high school. Without having seen any of director Baz Luhrmann's films at the time, I still considered him an excellent choice to capture the wild story of America at its most recklessly opulent. He's known for his flamboyant directorial style (something that stretches back to his excellent Strictly Ballroom, although probably best demonstrated in Moulin Rouge!), not to mention that he has a sturdy track record with creative adaptations of timeless literary classics, particularly his William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Leonardo DiCaprio, also attached to Gatsby back then, starred as the titular lovestruck teen in that film, similarly seemed to me to be the perfect choice for the titular character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic. As the years passed, I grew more excited, especially as the excellent cast filled out and filming began. Finally released, this new big screen rendition of The Great Gatsby doesn't really live up to the book, but it may be as good as Gatsby can get in cinema.
The story here, young bondsman Nick Carraway lives next door to the exorbitantly rich Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man who is holding out hope that he'll reunite with lost love Daisy Buchanan, is well known, and rather than use a paragraph to explain it, I'll just jump right into what makes this film work. The ensemble is the true key to the film's success, with each part cast with the right performer. DiCaprio is unsurprisingly fantastic as Gatsby, taking the same charisma he had as Howard Hughes in The Aviator and tweaking it with the proper amount of mystique, not to mention an accent that makes him sound like a relative of Katharine Hepburn. He perfectly portrays the hurt and longing, as well as the undying hope and optimism that he will eventually get the one thing his money can't buy. This object of his affection is of course Daisy, nicely played here as a damaged and somewhat bewildered woman by Carrie Mulligan. Tobey Maguire rounds out the main trifecta as Nick, bringing his usual naiveté to the role as he moves the story along via flashback. He, like DiCaprio, seemed like a perfect marriage between an actor and his character when cast. Joel Edgerton nearly steals the show as Tom Buchanan, Daisy's brutish husband, always a hulking presence compared to Gatsby and especially Nick. Isla Fisher and newcomer Elizabeth Debicki are both well-suited to their respective roles of Myrtle Wilson and Jordan Baker, though both are also underused (Debicki gets some time to shine early on, but practically disappears as the film goes on).
Having cast the right actors for the iconic characters, Luhrmann, who co-wrote the screenplay, then had to apply his patented flair and anachronistic musical taste, two elements that when combined, perfectly demonstrate that nearly unbearable opulence I mentioned. The party scenes in this film are truly insane, as unrealistically garish as they possibly could be, yet that's what makes them a Jay Gatsby party. The more debatable artistic touch is the use of hip-hop music swirled in with the appropriate jazz (Jay-Z produced the film's music alongside Luhrmann). The music is what helps sell just how wild these parties are, because while I am no fan of hip-hop (I would prefer the period jazz), and as I would understand how jazz was revolutionary and seemingly crazy in the 1920s, there is no escaping that the music of the period would even at its loudest and most untamed seem just a bit quaint. The use of modern music in this film is an artistic choice rather than a soundtrack cash-in for those involved, because it takes the creative route of melding two styles together, resulting in jazz covers of pop hits that open up a new way for the audience to connect with the story in the same manner as readers in the 1920s would with Fitzgerald's use of jazz in his novel.
Although Luhrmann's taste in music is a big part of his public appeal as a director, his visual style is a part of his success, and in Gatsby it's mostly worth commending. This film is a big budget, CGI-enfused, 3D extravaganza, and while that all sounds like a way to get a coveted young audience in the seats for story that lacks explosions and the presence of Robert Downey, Jr., there's no denying that it's all in the service of the story. The booming New York of the 1920s is beautifully, and hyper-realistically, rendered here, bursting with color and personality, owed both to the cinematography, special effects, and the costumes and production design (both credited to Luhrmann's wife). The one moment in the film that most perfectly captures the style and wonderfully overbearing energy is DiCaprio's formal introduction during one of his parties. I won't give away all the details, but it does involve fireworks and that grand crescendo in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
For everything Luhrmann gets right in this film, including the interesting music and wonderful visuals, the pacing never really hits a smooth consistency. The film is a bit slow until we meet Gatsby, but it nearly comes to a screeching halt when he and Daisy share the screen. This has nothing to do with DiCaprio, Mulligan, the visuals, or even the lines they recite, but rather the nature of approaching a classic piece of literature with too much reverence. With everything that Luhrmann and his team gleefully tweak for the sake of creativity, the story remains very much intact, and as a result the film just goes on for too long. When things pick up again (following a tense and excellent scene at the Plaza in New York City), the story seems to fly by the remaining events, including an iconic scene involving Gatsby's speedy yellow car. I can't imagine stretching the scene out as it does involve a split-second event, but it's just about the last "crucial" scene in the film I was anxious to see, and it was over just as quickly as it began. The story concludes as fans of the book know it will, although the entire film is bookended by a sequence with Nick at an asylum, recounting and writing his tale, a device to deliver full passages from Fitzgerald's text that works at first, but eventually becomes a bit overbearing (sometimes too much narration, regardless of how well-written, is just too much).
Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is a good film that may have only gotten better by altering the story, something that seems like heresy compared to cutting a few minor characters from the massive Harry Potter books. I have not seen any of the other Gatsby adaptations, the last serious attempt being 1974's film with Robert Redford as Gatsby (I've read that it's very boring), but I would wager that they've all failed in some way by either not understanding the source material or simply doing a poor job by trying too hard to make the perfect Gatsby. Luhrmann puts his spin on the story, and it's largely successful, but he cannot escape the sad truth that Fitzgerald's story is likely one that will never have a cinematic adaptation as widely loved as The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird. This film does remedy what may be the novel's weakness (as source material), which is that it tells a human story rather than an American one. Reading the book in high school (twice, no less) the focus was not just on the characters but on the symbolism and meaning, things present in film but not necessarily at the forefront when we have flesh and blood people bringing these characters to life. Of course, feeling something for the characters doesn't mean too much when you start to check your watch regularly throughout a film, but it is worth noting. This Gatsby comes close, and it's a film that may improve upon subsequent viewings, but for now it's goal of adapting the great American novel seems just out of reach, not unlike that green light. An ironically fitting fate for a movie about the ultimate close-but-no-cigar character of fiction. 7.5/10
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