Released: 2013
Director: Baz Lurhmann
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Leonardo DiCaprio & Tobey Maguire
Grade: A-
While no one in their right mind would call Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby a romantic comedy, it
is a film obsessed with romance and relationships: lost loves, familial
affections, infatuated friendships, unhappy marriages, and passionate affairs.
It’s a sumptuous adaptation, one which depicts the roaring twenties as a
stylized, saturated era in which the upper crust live in houses the size of
museums, socialites are enchantingly blasé, and the parties rival the biggest
Vegas show. There’s nothing subtle in Lurhmann’s world, and many reviews have criticized
him for focusing on the glitz, glam, and romance while ignoring the book’s larger
condemnation of all that opulence. I would argue, however, that the intention of Lurhmann’s film is not to romanticize the era, but to examine the
subjectivity of the human experience.
Rather than depict the reality of New York in the 1920s (something
a period piece like Downtown Abbey
tries to do in England), the camera depicts the perception of New York in the 1920s. The colors aren’t really that bright, the cars
aren’t really that fast, the houses aren’t really that large. That’s just how
Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the film's narrator, drunk on booze and elation, experiences them. All human beings are limited
to experiencing life from one specific point of view. While we can try to
empathize with others, we can literally only see the world through our own two eyeballs. Nick claims to be able to see things objectively, but his perspective is still
a subjective one.
Nick is fascinated with
perspective. Ever the watcher and perennial outside, Nick views himself as both
a part of and outside of what happens to him. During a rousing bacchanal, Nick
enjoys the liberating feeling of being drunk, but remains aware of the party as
part of the larger New York milieu. That age-old literary trope “the unreliable narrator”
manifests itself visually in the look, feel, and tone of the film. Things are bright, loud, and glittering because that's how they look to a college boy who has never seen decadence like this before. It’s only in the
background, in quick shots of a butler dumping half-empty martini glasses into
a bucket, or fishing champagne bottles out of a pool, or chipping away at an
ice block in sweltering heat, that Lurhmann hints at the reality Nick
chooses to ignore. Once the party is over, someone has to clean up the mess. Only
Lurhmann’s camera, seemingly accidentally, captures those moments of drudgery
that make the glamour possible.
Understanding this subjective presentation of the story is
crucial to understanding Gatsby himself (a charming Leonard DiCaprio). The
movie doesn’t condemn Gatsby’s flaws because our point of view character
doesn’t see them. When Gatsby reunites with Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), we
see a romanticized version of their reconnection. The film depicts their love
in a soft glow because Nick, won over by Gatsby’s dedication to his former
love, sees their romance as tragic, beautiful, and passionate. Gatsby gives
Daisy a scrapbook of her life, containing letters, pictures, and newspaper
clippings; he is so infatuated with her and she is so infatuated with herself
that they both see it as a testament to true love. Lurhmann
doesn’t knowingly introduce an ominous music cue to let us know something is
deeply, deeply wrong with this relationship, and that makes it easy to assume
Lurhmann doesn’t think there is anything wrong with it. Yet the film’s ending
assures us Lurhmann is aware of the
dark side of the decadent coin.
After her secret affair with Gatsby is brought into the open and Daisy accidentally kills her husband’s mistress in a car
accident, only Gatsby remains under the powerful illusion of true love
conquering all. Daisy returns to her husband, selfishly fleeing East Egg, and
Gatsby is shot in retribution for her crime. Both Daisy and Gatsby are absurdly
childlike, two adolescents playing at being fancy adults. Gatsby dies with the
idealistic notion that Daisy is ready to run away with him, unable to deal with
the idea she ever loved anyone but him. Daisy refuses to attend Gatsby’s
funeral or say goodbye to her cousin Nick, as always taking the easy way out
when things get hard.
Nick is so infatuated by Gatsby, so sure of his friend’s
moral righteousness, that he is literally driven to a sanitarium after he
dies, unable to cope in a world without Gatsby. As the winter of his
unhappiness fades and the flowers of spring blossom around him, Nick finishes
his novel, initially titling it Gatsby, then
adding a few words to make it The Great
Gatsby. From Nick’s point of view, this is a moment of triumph. He’s found
catharsis in telling the story of the summer he spent with his
enigmatic neighbor. Yet there’s something troubling about Nick’s hero
worship. He claims Gatsby is completely innocent in the tragedy inflicted on
him. While he may not have been driving the car that killed Myrtle or had an
affair with her in the first place, Gatsby is still deeply disturbed. He’s a
man who erased his identity, fabricated a new persona, based his entire
self-worth on his bank account, and dedicated his life to creating a fantasy
world for a former love interest. From Gatsby’s point of view, dedicating five years of your life to becoming rich and building a dream
life for a woman who is married to another man is a sweeping romantic gesture.
The ultimate tragedy of the film is that Nick never realizes that isn’t true.
So is Lurhmann’s film a perfect adaptation? No. I was rather uninspired for the first twenty
minutes or so when the telling-a-recent-tragic-story conceit made the film feel
too much like Moulin Rouge.
I enjoyed watching the over-the-top party scenes in the way I enjoy watching
music videos, but they didn’t elicit anything deeper than visual appreciation.
The CGI is used so abundantly in the first world-building portion of the movie
that I was sure I was watching scenes from The Great
Gatsby: The Video Game. (I was much more appreciative of the tour of Gatsby’s
house that seemed to take place in a physical space with huge walls full of
paintings, two story closets, and winding staircases.) And while I understand
the desire to preserve Fitzgerald’s prose, I found most of Nick’s narration to
be both distracting and unnecessary. The cast perfectly conveyed the emotions
Nick so carefully explained in voiceover, and I wish Lurhmann had trusted his actors
to tell the story without all the exposition.
The film only begins to sing once Gatsby appears and the
main ensemble is allowed to bounce off one another without the CGI tracking
shots and elaborate production numbers. DiCaprio is equal
parts boyishly charming and unsettlingly insecure, finding a way to display
both Gatsby’s social awkwardness and the way that awkwardness comes across as
charm. (Just look at his first meeting with Daisy where DiCaprio plays
everything with a stone-faced earnestness that makes the whole sequence
absolutely hilarious.) Carey Mulligan is a fantastic match for him, her Daisy
not exactly jubilant but all the more alluring for the sadness she exudes with
every sigh. She wants her daughter to be a fool because she isn’t one. She may
play at being girlish and stupid, but she’s smarter than she lets on, she’s
just too self-centered and too cowardly to use her intelligence to produce
anything good. Maguire doesn’t make much of an impression as Nick (he’s a
bit too smiling and cheerful for such an introverted figure), but it’s a hard
part to capture and Maguire is by no means a huge burden on the film, he just
doesn’t find the complexity Elizabeth Debicki (as Jordan Baker) and Joel
Edgerton (as Tom Buchanan) bring to their smaller roles.
Perhaps most
importantly, what Lurhmann presents on screen made me think. So much so, in fact, that I was motivated to write a (slightly off-topic) review
about it. Part
of this is due to the strong source material: Fitzgerald’s themes of class
privilege, upward mobility, the past vs. the present, and the shallowness of
the American dream remain scarily relevant today. And yet Lurhmann deserves his
credit too, for crafting a film in which his trademark opulent style compliments
rather than overshadows those themes. The film idolizes Gatsby the way Nick
does, and Lurhmann leaves it up to the audience, each with their own unique
point of view, to determine whether Gatsby is a figure of everlasting optimism
or one of decadent delusion.
Reality factor: As a huge fan of British literature from this
era (Mrs. Dalloway is my favorite
book) it is so bizarre to see the limited role WWI played on the American
consciousness in the 1920s. While Gatsby mentions the war a few times, the
story mostly focuses on the boom and decadence of the postwar period. British
literature set in this era, on the other hand, is fixated on The Great War: how
it affected the men who fought in it and how it destroyed the 19th
century worldview forever. America, with its geographical distance and limited
time spent in the war, just didn’t experience that level of cultural
destabilization. Instead we just threw parties. [2 out of 5]
Eye-candy factor: I’m sure a lot of people went gaga over Leo
in his well-tailored suits, but I was all about those comfy sweaters he wore when
bumming around with Daisy. Also that one-piece bathing suit was pretty great. [4 out of 5]
Aww factor: The scene where Gatsby shows Daisy the house he essentially built for her is delightful to watch because DiCaprio just seems so damn happy. The
utter glee as he throws his shirts at her is infectious, and I think it would
be impossible to leave the theater without understanding why Nick idolizes him
as the epitome of optimism.
[3 out of 5]
