2 ½ stars (out of four)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is, among other things, a tragic melodrama, a
portrait of upper-class life in the 1920s, a sharply observant social drama and
a powerful rebuke of the American Dream. But Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaptation
seems chiefly interested in this first one – Jay Gatsby’s story of love lost
and found as melodrama.
The crystallizing moment of Luhrmann’s interpretation comes
when Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) stands on a balcony in his bedroom and
tosses a cascade of pastel shirts onto his former (and now once again) love
Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). The image is one of many lifted directly from
the novel, and realized here in vivid color and gorgeous 3D. It is the
emotional and visual climax to a lovely montage set to the crooning of Lana Del Rey, and is one of
the more effective sequences in the film. The Lana Del Rey song creeps up a few
more times as a theme for the reunited lovers, making this moment the romantic
high point and the idyll Luhrmann wants us to recall when things go sour.
Baz Luhrmann, who wrote the script with frequent
collaborator Craig Pearce, takes the broad thematic strokes of the novel and
hangs one beautiful image after another onto the story.
The basics of that story will be familiar to anyone who read
the book (or skimmed the SparkNotes) in their high school English class. Nick
Carraway (Tobey Maguire) moves from the Midwest to a Long Island neighborhood
called West Egg for the summer. Intending to relax in a small cottage on the
bay and work on Wall Street selling bonds, he soon gets pulled into the
intoxicating world of his fabulously rich and curiously elusive neighbor, Jay
Gatsby. Gatsby’s mansion towers over Carraway’s modest rental and his
extraordinarily decadent parties roar late into the night.
The financial origins of Gatsby, a newly minted millionaire,
are a mystery to the guests of his parties, who gossip freely and concoct devious
and dubious rumors about the man. Perhaps Carraway’s cousin Daisy, who lives
across the bay in East Egg, knows his backstory. She wears the unmistakable
look of recognition when her friend Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki) mentions
Gatsby’s name one afternoon over tea.
Daisy’s blusterous husband Tom (an excellent Joel Edgerton)
scorns the extravagances of Gatsby’s parties and the flashiness that often
comes with “new money.” Tom plays polo on his expansive estate and gives orders
to his many maids and servants with a more dignified air of entitlement.
Director Baz Luhrmann, who has thrown a few good parties himself, no doubt feels differently. He seems
to have the most fun here when his characters are enjoying themselves too, and
the party scenes boast not only a frenzied, vibrant energy but also a playfully
anachronistic soundtrack (a trademark of Luhrmann’s since 1996’s Romeo +
Juliet). Produced by Jay-Z, the soundtrack
features a few of Jay-Z’s songs as well as covers of recognizable hits from the
past few decades and some original material, including the aforementioned song
by Lana Del Rey (whose frivolous socialite persona would make her a perfect fit
as either a performer or a guest at a Gatsby party).
Fitzgerald scholars (and English teachers across the
country) may react to many of Luhrmann’s creative choices as misguided or even
blasphemous but there is no question the movie feels most alive when Luhrmann
lets loose with his distinctively excessive style. An afternoon in a New York
City apartment with Tom and his mistress Myrtle (a charming Isla Fisher)
becomes just short of an all-out orgy. And you have to respect the movie’s
sheer audacity when Tobey Maguire starts chugging champagne from the bottle as the distorted growl of Kanye West blares on
the soundtrack.
But as brazen and inventive as some of these early scenes
are, Baz Luhrmann is surprisingly deferential to the source material as the
film goes on. The Great Gatsby turns out
to be a relatively straightforward and faithful adaptation. Little has been cut
or altered. The one significant deviation is the bizarre addition of a frame
story that places Nick Carraway in a sanitarium. Having apparently suffered a
mental breakdown, he recounts his summer with Gatsby to a therapist (Jack
Thompson). The therapist advises him to write down his feelings, so Carraway
begins typing a manuscript for a novel. (An unfortunate, groan-inducing moment
occurs in the final scene when Carraway titles the finished manuscript.)
Even this, however, is really just a way to include sizable
excerpts of Fitzgerald’s prose in the voice-over narration. To accompany these
quotations, Luhrmann uses the exceptionally tacky effect of superimposing whole
sentences on screen where the words float toward you in 3D. The script is
almost too respectful of the novel, like a high school sophomore too nervous to
write a bold, original thesis and too intimidated by Fitzgerald’s writing to do
anything but quote it at length and underline the key phrases. Luhrmann means
to pay tribute to some of the novel’s classic lines but by using them as a
stylistic embellishment, he robs them of their soulfulness.
He also makes all the revelry and partying in the first act
so much fun that by the time we get to the meat of the story, the film’s
seriousness feels like a bit of a buzzkill. A number of scenes drag, not
because of any shortage of substantial material (we are talking about the Great
American Novel, after all) but because Luhrmann has not properly set himself up
to explore any more interesting thematic territory than love and infidelity.
The early scenes are fun but lay down none of the necessary groundwork for the
book’s weightier ideas about wealth, class and the hollowness of American
capitalism. Instead, the weepy strings of Craig Armstrong’s score steer the
film toward the big emotions that are Baz Luhrmann’s forte.
And with a cast as strong as this one, those big emotions
can be quite compelling. Leonardo DiCaprio’s easy charisma makes him a natural
choice for the role and he is effective in the more explosive moments of the
last act. But I wonder if he gives away too much too soon. We see Gatsby’s
insecurities and fears on DiCaprio’s face as early as his second scene and the
role might have benefited from a less expressive and more inscrutable
performance. On the other hand, Joel Edgerton is great fun huffing and puffing
with his hands on his hips and a cigar in his mouth. He delivers some
wonderful, bloviating speeches on race, politics and the temperature of the
sun.
Prior to seeing The Great Gatsby I wondered if Baz Luhrmann was a poor choice to
direct this movie. Surprisingly though, it is the novel that holds Luhrmann
back. Forced to contend with the novel’s greatness, an unfair task to ask of
any director, he does admirably but does not make a great
movie. And that’s okay. He still throws a hell of a party.
- Steve Avigliano, 5/14/13
No comments:
Post a Comment