Starting with Romeo + Juliet and solidifying his technique with Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann has become known for computer-generated camera swoops across swaths of cityscape, intentionally incongruous layerings of modern music onto earlier epochs, and impossibly shiny and frenetic frames.
If you like that sort of thing, you’ll love The Great Gatsby. Unless you hate the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel upon which it’s based. Because Luhrmann has managed to create a Gatsby that has “LUHRMANN” written all over it, all while staying true to the original story.
That story is one you probably know: Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) has a little house on the Long Island bayside community of West Egg, right next door to the palatial estate of the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the place to be for New Yorkers that summer of 1922. But it’s all for show, a show put on with for a singular purpose: to attract Daisy (Carey Mulligan), Gatsby’s long-lost love, who just so happens to be Nick’s cousin and is now married and living across the bay in East Egg.
Luhrmann literally brings us into the story by pulling us through a gilt, art-deco frame toward that green light of which Fitzgerald and Gatsby make so much (if you remember one thing from the book, it’s that frigging green light), and we find ourselves in a Roaring ’20s that truly roars, whether with the hellish dinginess of the industrially strip-mined “City of Ashes” or the swanky high life enjoyed by the Prohibition Era wealthy. Jay Z’s score serves the film well, a high-tech mélange of Jazz Age tags with contemporary rap that imparts to us 21st-century folk something of the spirit felt by our predecessors as they partied like it was 1999.
Similarly, Luhrmann’s visuals really do the trick here. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby goes out of his way to fashion himself larger than life, and larger than life is that at which Luhrmann excels. So when we are first given entry to Gatsby’s estate, it’s fitting that we find it a marriage of Las Vegas, Burning Man, and am overflowing catalog of Roaring ’20s accoutrements. It’s as effective as it is fun.
The Great Gatsby à la Luhrmann works as well as it does partly because the director clearly knows and loves the novel. His liberties never violate the essence of the origin, staying true not just to the dialog, but making extensive use of Carraway’s voiceover by creating a context for him to write the story, thus giving us direct access to the novel’s very best narrative bits. And those bits are really quite lovely, however one might feel about Fitzgerald’s metaphorical heavy-handedness.
Heavy-handedness is, of course, one of the easiest criticism to level at Luhrmann, even if what he does with that hand is always intentional. And I am certainly one of those who experience Luhrmann as overindulgent, too often applying his particular cinematic flourishes just because he can. But in The Great Gatsby Luhrmann shows, if not necessarily restraint, perhaps a bit better sense of keeping his eye on the big picture. Yes, he repeatedly swoops in and out of NYC, repeatedly sets up busy set pieces designed to dazzle; but generally all of these serve the whole as much as they serve themselves.
And there are some brilliant bits. One of the finest is Nick’s all-day foray into debauchery with Tom (Joel Edgerton) and his mistress’s set. It’s a fantastic sequence, evoking all the euphoria and claustrophobia that can coexist in one’s head during such romps. The scene is capped off with Nick gazing at the buildings across the way and marveling at what might be going on behind those other windows, so much like the one out of which he gazes. “I waswithin and without,” he says, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Fitzgerald couldn’t have teed it up better for Luhrmann if he tried.
{loadposition latestlife}Not everyone’s going to like the casting of Maguire and DiCaprio. It’s certainly not because they’re each over a half-decade older than their protagonists, because these are two men who still like a little like boys. Rather, it probably has something to do with having such familiar actors as such well-known characters making it hard to forget that these are actors playing roles. This difficulty suspending disbelief is exacerbated by the fact that everyone except Edgerton seems so young that it’s hard not to think of kids playing dress-up. But that’s kind of what Fitzgerald was going for: people dressing themselves up in certain life roles. The truth is that the acting is very fit to the purpose at hand.
If there’s a problem with the film, it’s in the last third, wherein—as usual—we find Luhrmann dipping into his bag of cinematic tricks a few too many times, so that instead of being tickled we can’t help feeling he’s already been there and done that. Plus, because by this point Luhrmann has so often worked the proceedings up to a fever pitch, now there’s simply nowhere for him to go. If this one goes to 11[1] but it had hit 11 an hour ago, there’s nowhere to go but down.
Nonetheless, Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby infuses the classic tale to life with a sort of force that—for some of us, at least—the novel doesn’t possess on its own. On the flip side, Fitzgerald’s carefully measured storytelling helps Luhrmann more fully realize his potential as an artiste.
The Great Gatsby is now playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach (2025 E. 4th Street, LB 90804) in “classic 2-D.” For info on show times call 562.438.5435 or visit arttheatrelongbeach.com.