Plot
Seeking to hit it big in the Big Apple, Nick Carroway (Toby Maguire) – a wannabe writer and WWI veteran – moves to Long Island to work in stocks. He rents a small house next door to the castle-mansion of elusive partyboy millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and, after reacquainting with his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), Nick is swiftly thrown into the heart of New York’s grandiloquent nouveau riche party culture. It isn’t long however before Gatsby comes calling and draws the unwitting Nick into his world of secrets, extravagancies and lost love.
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| Dem Fezzes. |
Review
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has enjoyed a mythic reputation since it’s publication nearly 90 years ago. Considered among as part of the ‘Great American Novel’ pantheon of literature, it’s been subject to four previous – largely unsuccessful – screen adaptations. Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby heralds its return to the cinematic big-screen – complete with Luhrmann-esque high-concept visual flare and stylistic wizardry – but can it prove to be the adaptation that Fitzgerald’s work has been waiting for?
It ain’t no Romeo & Juliet.
The Great Gatsby is a near relentless, frenetic, aesethic thunderpunch to the eyes and ears. It’s coloured like a Sunday morning cartoon with the same level of energy, sprinting eagerly from scene-to-scene, cut-to-cut. So far as visceral and visual entertainment goes, Gatsby is resolutely from the Luhrmann camp of kinetic stylistic extravagance.
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| Having never before been to Thailand, Nick was amazed at what they could hide up there. |
However, for each scene of breakneck party fabulousness there’s another of slow contemplation, where dialogue between characters – intended for exposition – feels slow and unwieldy, hindered by Luhrmann’s dedication to his breathless technique. Fortunately then, Gatsby is helped no end by a startling central turn by Leonardo DiCaprio. Equal parts grinning heartthrob and ominous man of mystery, DiCaprio knocks it out of the park, putting the rest of the resolutely one-dimensional cast to shame.
Gatsby is not entirely insubstantial, as some reviews may claim. It’s just there is such a monumental omnipresence of all-singing, all-dancing pomp and celebration – such a deluge of colour, life and vigour – that it could have all the substance in the world and still not live up to it’s own eye-melting stylistic supremacy. As it stands, the Sin City-esque torrent of CGI and theatrical expression is sometimes almost wearying in its attempts to wow, often losing that sense of humility and humanity that made Luhrmann’s equally ostentatious Romeo & Juliet work.
Gatsby ultimately suffers from a basic lack of care in its direction. Numerous plot points are terribly handled, either dealt with too explicitly or, more frequently, presented far too subtly to ever hope to register properly. Case in point: Gatsby and his fortune are supposed to an imperceptible countrywide mystery. And they are. So much so that the film barely deigns to tell you the truth and yet has his secrecy diegetically blown with, seemingly, a few simple phone calls. It’s this lack of care, this bewildering absence of narrative sheen considering the stylistic and graphical finesse, that leaves the entire production feeling somewhat undernourished.
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| The longer you stare, the more it feels as though he's making love to your soul itself. |
This isn’t to say that Gatsby is a failure in terms of narrative, characters, themes and all those lovely abstract notions (though there’s much to be said for its light hand in dealing with the sticky issues of society and its inherent degradation, an omnipotent force in Fitzgerald’s book). Merely that they could not even wipe the derriere of its extraordinary technical achievements. Much a boisterous fanfare has been made of Gatsby’s soundtrack – mixing Jay-Z, Florence & the Machine, electro babble and classical strings in the freakiest musical cauldron this side of Eurovision – but its effect is much the same as everything else: masterfully entertaining but ultimately superficial.
There’s been arguments made that Baz Luhrmann was simply not the right man to make this film, his style too fundamentally avant-garde to work with the subtle treatise many believe The Great Gatsby to be. And that’s total rubbish. Any man who can turn Romeo & Juliet into a homoerotically charged street gangster bow-out can do whatever the hell he likes. And he so nearly gets it right with Gatsby. It’s exciting, awe-inspiring at times and undeniably entertaining and if he had just held himself back an inch, allowed the characters to breathe away from the cloying air of deprived social excess, Gatsby may have found itself competing for far more than the highest summer gross
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| It's not the perspective, they're just very small men. |
Verdict
While lacking in regards to its source material’s heavy critique of societal flaws, The Great Gatsby can count itself a success. It’s experimental in some ways, older than the hills in others (and completely loses the plot in others still) but it – mostly – remains a spectacular, entertaining romp through a bygone era.
3/5
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