REVIEW: The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby (2013): Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Written by: Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. Based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki. Rated PG-13 (Flappers' flapping). Running time: 143 minutes.

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

REVIEW: Django Unchained

Django Unchained (2012): Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated R (All the blood and racial epithets you'd expect of the antebellum South and then some). Running time: 165 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

The genius of Quentin Tarantino has always been his ability to pull off scenes that should never work. Take for example Kill Bill, that sprawling two-part tribute to his favorite exploitation flicks and a one-stop deposit for all his craziest ideas. In Kill Bill, he drags his characters through one extravagant set piece after another and indulges in all sorts of ludicrous action. Yet somehow, miraculously, he makes them feel human. He convinces us they are worth rooting for and we actually feel invested in his lunacy.

Watching his work in recent years – both Kill Bill films, Inglourious Basterds, and now his latest, Django Unchained – has often felt like watching a man juggling live sticks of dynamite. At any moment, it seems, he could trip and the whole thing would go kablooey right in his face. To top it off, his style is wildly brash and self-assured, as though he never doubted anything less than the complete and total success of his manic creations.

His most recent creation is a rescue-the-girl western set in the Old South two years before the Civil War. A slave named Django (played with grim, one-note determination by Jamie Foxx) is trudging through the Texas wilderness on a chain gang when a traveling German dentist appears out of the darkness. Dr. King Schultz (a delightful Christoph Waltz) introduces himself to the two slave traders escorting the chain gang.

Like so many Tarantino characters, Schultz has a large vocabulary and a flair for theatricality. He dances around the subject a while but eventually makes his intentions clear. He is going to buy Django from them whether they agree to it or not. This opening scene, cheerfully overwritten and crackling with tension, is a thrill. Quentin Tarantino neatly lays out the stakes and has fun letting the situation slowly play out.

Django and Schultz soon ride off in a carriage that has a large white tooth on its roof bouncing on a spring (a wonderfully goofy and inspired sight gag that, judging by how often we see it in the film’s first act, Mr. Tarantino is clearly very proud of). We learn that Schultz is not a dentist but a bounty hunter. He needs Django to identify a trio of wanted men who previously worked on a plantation where Django was once a resident.

What follows is a series of amusing, if needlessly drawn-out, episodes that feature Don Johnson as a mustachioed plantation owner and Jonah Hill as Ku Klux Klan leader. There are some good nyuks had over the Klan’s homemade white hoods but this leg of the movie doesn’t quite have that Tarantino magic and the movie plods along for a while until it finds its real story.

Django wants to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington), who is currently a house slave for the wealthy and debonair Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio having a lot of fun with a Southern accent). Candie runs a profitable business pitting slaves against each other in fight-to-the-death matches at his manor – named Candyland (nyuk, nyuk) – so Django and Schultz devise a plan to dupe Candie into selling them Django’s wife by posing as slave traders interested in buying one of his prize fighters.

Django Unchained is on more sure footing in the scenes at Candyland, largely thanks to Mr. DiCaprio’s effortless charm and a fine turn by Samuel L. Jackson (under some fantastic old man makeup) as Stephen, Candie’s head slave. Stephen, it turns out, is actually the most interesting character in the film and the whole third act turns on the keen observations of this loyal family servant.

Quentin Tarantino is a master at crafting plots that gradually build in tension and complexity, and for a while Django Unchained seems poised for some last unexpected turn to resolve Django and Schultz’s crafty bait-and-switch scheme. But instead, Mr. Tarantino opts for a lazier ending. In the final half-hour, the movie devolves into a gratuitous and numbingly uninventive bloodbath that cheapens everything that came before it.

Quentin Tarantino, usually such a smart writer, embraces all his worst impulses here. The violence is bloody and over-the-top but the final product resembles something a Tarantino imitator might have churned out – stylized and violent but devoid of anything thematically substantial.

The cast is also noticeably lacking in female roles. Sure, the worlds of Mr. Tarantino’s characters are typically male-dominated but he is usually good about writing at least a few strong women into his films. Kerry Washington, however, is relegated to playing the weeping damsel in distress and the other women in the film are little more than pretty faces.

And while no one expected this film to be racially sensitive, there is no doubt that a major point of contention for many will be Mr. Tarantino’s overuse of a particular racial slur. Granted, the movie’s historical context does allow him to use the word but it gets tossed around so frequently and with such relish, it’s distracting. It is easily the most said word in the film, which reduces the impact it might have had if uttered less often.

There are moments when Django Unchained clicks and might have held up as a solid, if not classic, Tarantino film. Mr. Tarantino’s comedic timing is still sharp and his love of dialogue is as apparent as ever. But the ending is such a disappointment it nearly ruins the whole movie. Though it pains me to say it, for the first time, Quentin Tarantino drops the dynamite and blows himself up.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/5/13

REVIEW: J. Edgar

J. Edgar (2011): Dir. Clint Eastwood. Written by: Dustin Lance Black. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts and Judi Dench. Rated R (Language). Running time: 137 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Leonardo DiCaprio assumes the titular role in J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s stately biopic about the former head of the FBI. The film consists mostly of routine biopic fare but also finds room for some deeply Freudian moments that flesh out some of the less factually certain details of J. Edgar Hoover’s personal life.

The film opens in the late 1960s as Hoover nears retirement and DiCaprio resembles Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane more than a little as he shuffles around Hoover’s Washington office buried under prosthetics. Hoover dictates his biography to a revolving series of interns and the film uses this framework to launch into flashbacks that detail the formation of the FBI and Hoover’s subsequent efforts to improve and perfect the Bureau.

In these flashbacks we are introduced to all the salient players in Hoover’s life: his personal assistant Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his mother (Judi Dench) and FBI Assistant Director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Meanwhile the film addresses still relevant issues of national security when they were in their formative years of debate and controversy. To what degree must the American people’s privacy be sacrificed in order to protect the country from its enemies? Hoover’s insistence on obtaining information at whatever cost can be viewed as a sort of early Patriot Act philosophy but Eastwood presents this from a historical, not allegorical, perspective.

Hoover also understood the importance of good PR and much time is spent on the media spectacle that was the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, one of the first opportunities for the then-young FBI to prove its worth to a captivated public. Eastwood also has some fun depicting the FBI’s tenuous relationship with Hollywood and the movies’ representation of gangsters and G-men. Many of these scenes engage in the self-conscious reminders that we are watching a historical drama that have become typical of a big-budget biopic. Some of these moments are playful (Hoover’s radical idea of creating a centralized database of so-called “finger imprints” is met with much reluctance) while others are tedious (when talking to Bobby Kennedy, Hoover has to clarify that he means the President when he says, “your brother”).

Though J. Edgar enters decidedly murkier territory in terms of historical accuracy when presenting Hoover’s personal life, the film finds its stride dramatically when it strays from the strict facts. Judi Dench smolders and snarls with maternal oppression as Anne Marie Hoover, whose relationship with her son (mostly depicted in scenes set in her bedroom) seems eerily intimate yet cold. Despite their closeness (Hoover continues to live with his mother long after most birds choose to leave the nest), she has little regard for her son’s emotions.

The same cannot be said of Clyde Tolson, whom Hoover takes on as his right-hand man early on and quickly forms a deep friendship with. Their relationship, which always seems on the verge of blossoming into something more but never quite does, provides J. Edgar with its emotional core; the pair’s scenes of understated flirtation are among the best in the film. Armie Hammer, whose face resembles that of a Ken doll – both rugged and smoothly plastic – had a star turn playing opposite himself as the Winklevoss twins in last year’s The Social Network and again reminds us how important a strong supporting performance can be. In his scenes with Hammer, DiCaprio loosens up and gives his portrayal of Hoover some much needed warmth and humanity. Underneath the hard-edged FBI director, DiCaprio finds an emotionally complex man.

Unfortunately the film never convincingly pulls these two halves of Hoover – the professional and the personal – into a coherent whole. The script, written by Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for his Milk screenplay) feels disjointed. The film does not fully connect the anguish of Hoover, the private citizen, to the ambition of Hoover, the public figure; there is no Rosebud to provide us the narrative key into his life story. Had the screenplay been better focused, these contradictions of character might have made a scintillating portrait, but though the film offers some fascinating anecdotes and plenty of austere reminders of Hoover’s historical legacy, the man himself remains an elusive figure.

- Steve Avigliano, 11/18/11

REVIEW: Inception

Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout). Running time: 148 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.

A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.

Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.

The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.

This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.

Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.

The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.

Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10

BEST OF THE DECADE - #4: The Departed

The Departed (2006): Dir. Martin Scorsese. Written by William Monahan, based on the film Infernal Affairs. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin. Rated R (strong brutal violence, pervasive language, some strong sexual content and drug material). Running time: 151 minutes.

The Departed is the third of three excellent Martin Scorsese films released this decade, each starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Scorsese reasserted his versatility with Gangs of New York and The Aviator, bringing his characteristic energy to a historical drama and biopic, respectively. The Departed has been labeled a “return to form” for the director, returning to the subject of his most acclaimed films: gangsters. While that statement underrates the stellar work he’s been putting out, The Departed is particularly noteworthy for bringing a youthfulness to the world of organized crime Scorsese is so familiar with. In his fourth decade of filmmaking, he hasn’t lost any of his fervor for making kinetic cinema, and The Departed is a rapidly paced, gleefully stylized gangster story.

Frank Costello, played by Jack Nicholson, opens the film with a voiceover that provides some context to organized crime in Boston, run largely by the Irish as opposed to the Italians who dominate Scorsese’s usual New York. The monologue primarily serves as an introduction to the man who looms large over the film: a racist, vulgar, and psychotic mobster played with over-the-top zeal in a way only Nicholson can get away with. The montage then establishes the two main characters, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a recently promoted state trooper and Costello’s inside man in the state police, and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) an undercover cop who works his way into becoming one of Costello’s main men. Scorsese packs the opening twenty minutes with necessary exposition and subtle characterizations, introducing us to the main players and, ingeniously, two minor characters that play significant roles in the final scenes. Much is explained in a short amount of time, and Scorsese conveys it all in a stylistic blur of montages, flashbacks and crosscutting.

The Departed’s style is largely indebted to editor Thelma Schoonmaker, a frequent collaborator with Scorsese. Monahan’s script flows beautifully onscreen, every scene transitioning seamlessly into the next. No doubt many scenes were cut, but the final product is so polished, it’s difficult to imagine a single shot out of place. The editing also brings out some revealing contrasts by frequently intercutting scenes of Costigan’s terrifying and violent life undercover, with scenes of Costigan enjoying a cushy job and an upper-class lifestyle. The constantly moving camera also brings much energy to the film, panning and zooming to follow the rhythms of the dialogue and to underscore the character dynamics.

The attention to detail in the film elevates it beyond the expectations for the average gangster movie, and Scorsese’s use of sound plays a large part in bringing out these details. The first time we meet Costigan, we understand his intelligence by hearing his quick pencil scratches on his police exam. Another scene uses only the sound of screeching car brakes as a transition between scenes, conveying the immediacy of the moment without wasting the few seconds it would take to have an establishing shot of the car. Throughout the film the two double agents communicate with their superiors via cell phones, and phone vibrations and rings play a major role in creating tension. One of the tensest scenes in the film is comprised of little more than close-ups of Costigan and Sullivan and the sound of a vibrating phone.

As is expected with a Scorsese film, The Departed also features an excellent soundtrack, with nearly every scene in the film accompanied by music. The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter,” a favorite of Scorsese’s, appears more than once, as does Dropkick Murphy’s “Shipping Up to Boston,” which becomes something of an anthem for the film. John Lennon’s “Well Well Well” appears moments before Costello humorously misquotes the music legend, and a great live version of “Comfortably Numb” ironically accompanies a scene between Costigan and Madolyn, his pain killer supplier. Howard Shore’s score, performed mostly by Spanish guitars rather than an orchestra, fills in the gaps with a few memorable themes.

Adapted from the Chinese thriller, Infernal Affairs, William Monahan’s script uses dark humor much as Scorsese’s Goodfellas does, providing some unexpected laughs in an otherwise dense crime drama. Much of this humor comes from the banter of Costello’s cronies and the state police, men whose daily exposure to crime have caused them to take a cavalier approach to violence. The script features a slew of vulgar but undeniably funny one-liners, most of which are uttered by Mark Wahlberg in an Oscar-nominated performance. The heart of the film, however, revolves around Sullivan and Costigan, and DiCaprio and Damon express a range of anxieties as the two men lose track of their identities by pretending to be other people. Vera Farmiga makes a complex character out of a supporting role, Dr. Madolyn Madden, a therapist who becomes involved with the two men, and her dialogue with them provides absorbing interludes to the main action.

Watching the film again, The Departed’s complex plot holds up, and its thematic layers continue to reveal themselves after multiple viewings. Scorsese packs every shot with small details, visual jokes and foreshadowing. The result is that of supreme craftsmanship, and one of Scorsese’s most vibrantly entertaining films to date.