Jay-Z Gatsby

Mulligan as Daisy in Buz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

««1/2 The Great Gatsby. Written by Baz Luhrman & Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Directed by Baz Luhrman. At area theaters.

         

One challenge of making a movie of The Great Gatsby is that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a better filmmaker on the page than 99% of those who make films for a living. Consider a passage like this: “At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.” Here the novelist is not only evoking an immediate image, but also a soundtrack, a feeling, an existential impression of the age. In short, he’s doing everything a film might ideally do. A film of Gatsby is never an “adaptation”—it’s always a remake.

          Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet) has produced some memorable films over the years, but they weren’t memorable necessarily because they were good. The one he’s most known for, Moulin Rouge! (2001) was vivid and fresh and energetic, but also derivative, sophomoric, and hyperactive. Luhrmann makes films the same way an insistent drunk at a party keeps talking to you when you’re trying to pull away from him—he doesn’t take the hint, but just keeps talking faster, louder. This doesn’t sound like the best approach to material with the limpid, fragile beauty of Fitzgerald’s prose.

          Alas, Luhrmann runs true to form early on, making way too much of the Jay-Z-scored party scenes at Gatsby’s mansion. It’s the kind of Bacchanalian excess that is supposed to give us a feel for the times, but always feels the same whether set in the 1920’s, the 1780’s, or the first century AD. After all, there’s always the booze and the women, and don’t the period costumes come off anyway? In the novel, Fitzgerald disposed of those scenes with a few paragraphs of cutting description. They were never supposed to be that important.

          Perhaps the most welcome surprise of Luhrmann’s Gatsby is that, after the parties and the breakneck start, he defeats his own impulses and gives the material some space to breathe. Watching it, we get the impression that he believes the events depicted—the talky bits, even—have their own degree of interest, without need of punching up with intrusive cutting or musical cues. Luhrmann has given us something quite restrained, by his standards.

          Nor can the casting be faulted. As Gatsby, the 39 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio can pass for a man in his early thirties, and thanks to his work in Titanic and The Aviator, has the right odor to play the lover and the arriviste millionaire. Carey Mulligan certainly possesses the look and the chops to play the ethereal, tormented Daisy. Relative newcomer Elizabeth Debicki is statuesque and ravishing as Jordan Baker, professional golfer and (in the book) abortive love interest of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). And Maguire is himself, no more or no less.

          So why is this film so uninvolving? For starters, Luhrmann and screenwriter Craig Pierce unaccountably jettison the dalliance between Nick and Jordan. This not only drains their estrangement of consequence, but makes Carraway little more than an interested observer. While there’s much to mourn in the loss of innocence of a real, rounded character, the disappointment of a mere narrator doesn’t seem like much to care about.

          But the problem runs deeper. Why is it that in 2013, in the aftermath of a financial meltdown caused by the cupidity of Wall Street, Luhrmann can’t take lines like “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness…” and make them throb with more passion, more relevance? Like the careless rich Fitzgerald excoriates, Luhrmann had all the resources he needed to do anything he wanted-- $127 million, to be precise—yet couldn’t locate the one thing he needed that comes free: the outrage. For although Gatsby is remembered as the quintessential “Jazz Age” novel, it really is a deeply indignant book, a cri de coeur for an extraordinary man crushed by the dull, immoveable stupidity of those more fortunate than himself. No doubt Fitzgerald, hailing from a middle class Midwestern background, empathized deeply with Gatsby, and saw him as more than just a nice fellow who got a raw deal.

          They say that if you wonder if you’re in a class war, you’ve already lost it. With rich admirers like Luhrmann, this Gatsby never had a chance. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro