The Great Gatsby

Get your glad rags on

In 1996 Baz Luhrman presented a garishly kinetic ‘re-imagining’ of Romeo and Juliet to widespread acclaim, effectively introducing a new generation to the genius of the great bard. Seventeen years on and Luhrman is attempting to prise open another classic of western literature, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – beloved by many and highly regarded as one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. The stakes are high then. Yet despite largely forgettable intermediate forays such as Australia, Baz is back attacking the source material with the same strutting bravado he is known and oftentimes criticised for.

Comprising the fourth attempt at transferring The Great Gatsby to celluloid, this version is very much made in ‘Luhrman inc’ fashion, full of an over the top excitable style, fluffed and buffed with cgi and a colour palette that, though striking, boarders on the outrageous, giving the whole thing closer resemblance to a comic strip than a period piece. Though some of the book’s plot strands have been trimmed, the bulk of the novel is here (the 1920’s Long Island setting; reluctant socialite Nick Carraway; his enigmatic neighbour Jay Gatsby attempting to rekindle lost love with ‘it’ girl Daisy Buchanan; the raucous parties; the social bankruptcy) with the vital scenes being compartmentalised into a pleasing cocktail of set-pieces topped off with a soundtrack complied by a veritable music festival of modern artists. This mixing of old and new, particularly the largely pop oriented music with the 1920’s setting will be heretical to some, but actually works in its insolence adding a stark emotive temerity to the proceedings.

The exhibit ‘A’ of a director out to prove his showmanship- and reportedly catering for the largest chunk of the film’s budget- must surely be in the portrayal of the free for all, carnival like parties staged from Gatsby’s own private Neuschwanstein of a mansion. With a restlessly roving camera and trippy quick cutting showing an army of thrill-seekers in full swing, this will be a test in patience for some, but otherwise provides an attention deficit visual treat and adroitly translates the novel’s heady era for 2013’s anything, anytime epoch.

The vibrant cacophony and unabashed spectacle of the party segments take up much of the early screen time, but eventually give way to the beating heart of the film’s more intimate moments. Here, as in Romeo and Juliet, Luhrman’s proves his skill in capturing something of the ‘quickening’ of a love encounter and the heightened sense of awareness that goes with it. No-where is this more perfectly captured than in the scene where Nick envisions Gatsby and Daisy’s initial pairing. At the crucial instance of a first kiss, Gatsby hesitates in the revelation that from this point on he can no longer ‘romp like the mind of God’, but will instead be forever committed to Daisy and the dream she represents. It is a powerfully nuanced scene in its portrayal of the flitting nature of life, which can so dramatically and catastrophically shift in a mere moment. Beautiful in its epiphanic aura; here is one flashback whose sepia tones we can forgive.

Ever the advocate of amour then, Luhrman manoeuvres round the novel’s larger themes of man in moral and social tumult, focusing instead on doomed romance. Yet in doing so he does not eschew the heavy stuff or the core motif of The Great Gatsby which is ultimately concerned with the tragedy of existing within temporal reality. Leonardo DiCaprio’s seismic turn as Gatsby; a man out of depth and out of time, is expert. He imbues the illusiveness of a character with a mysterious history, whilst is capable of eliciting as much frustrated confusion as tender fraternal empathy from the viewer. With a remarkably fresh face DiCaprio renders Gatsby as a troubled trickster- a conman whose attractive feyness gives way to the breathless jittery wreck of his true self, wound dangerously tight around a juvenile belief that he can ‘repeat the past.’

Elsewhere the other perfectly cast actors do a splendid job of arresting or rebuffing our sympathies. Cary Mulligan does an airy impression of Daisy who, less the self-pitying tease found in the book, is more a delicate waif barely holding it together and in need of saving. Joel Egerton, in a steamroller of a performance is outstanding as Tom Buchanan – a man like his wife, essentially hollow and without any grand vision, who cares little for the consequences of his actions and even less for the fortunes of others outside his set.

Meanwhile Toby McGuire plays a disillusioned Nick Caraway, confined to an asylum and reconciling his fateful summer with Gatsby by putting pen to paper. It’s a handy filmic device to justify the narration and provides subtle touches such as the tweaking of the finished memoir’s title, mirroring Fitzgerald’s own indecision in the matter. Though McGuire’s usual blandness flattens any of the biting sarcasm of the Caraway found in the book, it’s an honest performance and the actor at least summons the right amount of awed puzzlement for this ‘non-judgmental observer’ and audience mediator.

In the end Gastby’s super heroics lie not just in his ability to throw a big rave, but in his being a symbol of hope for Nick. Glitzy, modern modifications aside it’s another example of this Great Gatsby staying true to the text in that the film is less about Gatsby bagging the girl and more about Nick’s relationship with the man and icon. In the face of his internal conflict, chequered past and utter superficiality, Gatsby moulds his grand vision from a lofty truth honed from the apex of his being and in doing so represents the noble, though chronically doomed, inherently human preoccupation of ‘beating against the current’. To Nick’s he is ‘better than the whole damn bunch put together’ and stands for a glowing morality of honest purpose amid a din of soulless self-indulgence. A worthy purveyor then, of that most and American of things – the dream.

Though the Luhrman ‘experience’ threatens to saturate, ultimately what the director has delivered comprises an insightful translation of Fitzgerald’s novel with its big themes and concerns left intact. Standing on its own two flamboyantly dressed feet as an engaging study into the universal human condition, the film remains, despite the hullabaloo, as faithful an adaptation of The Great Gatsby as there ever was.