The Great Gatsby review

               After almost 20 years, Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of poppy, post-modern mash-ups like “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge”, has now reteamed with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was essentially rocketed to stardom after playing Romeo in 1995. Here, DiCaprio plays another obsessive idealist who just doesn’t know when to butt out of other peoples relationships. Also, like Baz’s previous work, this 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgeral’s beloved novel “The Great Gatsby”, is a big and brassy statement that includes this director’s usual hyperactive camera work, anachronistic music choices and lots and lots of glitter.

                Toby McGuier plays the film’s narrator Nick Carraway. As an obvious framing device his character is encouraged to type the story as a therapeutic way of dealing with his past. Through him we see the story develop from his perspective. We see how he befriends the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Leo DiCaprio) and how he tries to help him reconnect with his past-lover Daisy (Carey Mulligan), who is now married to be macho Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Within his gaze we see how Carraway looks up to Gatsby; how he admires his wealth, his adventurous life, his bacchanalian parties and even his masculine beauty. Of course once he manages to get Gatsby and Daisy together things don’t quite go as well as planned and tensions rise within the group.

                Like usual, Baz Luhrmann decides to go with a more -is-more stylistic approach to the source material. Tapping into the mythic roaring 20’s of its time period, Luhrmann draws connections between the pre-depression debaucheries of the upper-class with the more current, flamboyant hip-hop projections of wealth. Jay-Z, hired to produce the soundtrack, adds a lot of rap and dance music to the background score. Some might see this as a problem, but weirdly, with the rags to riches story of the central character and the mo-money-mo-problems message of the film, the soundtrack makes odd sense. 

                Visually this film is audacious and aggressive. The sets are big, the cinematography is bold, and the colors are crisp and consciously used. The early party scenes in particular are wildly shot and with the bizarre soundtrack accompanying, there’s almost a hypnotic quality to first half of this pop-art movie. Unfortunately, when the story has to come back up for air and the characters begin to talk to each other and the melodrama takes center stage, the fissures in Luhrmann’s abilities begin to widen.
                Much of the second half of the movie never quite lives up to the brash promise made in the establishing scenes. Leo is great as Gatsby (sorry for that pun) as he can interchange from mysterious, to surprised, to impassioned and pathetic, all at the same time. However, nobody else seems to be taking their parts as seriously. Mulligan and Edgerton, who are usually much better than this, are both distractingly over-affected and one dimensional.  McGuire, as the avatar for the audience to enter this story, is especially flat and underdeveloped. His part in particular is much more crucial towards the overall effectiveness of the movie and that ends up being the ball that’s dropped the hardest.  

                This movie looks great and as a piece of visual art it’s worth the money spent to see it blown up on the big screen. It is made from a singular creative viewpoint and like a hip-hop song, Luhrmann knows how to mix and sample ideas like Jazz culture, burlesque, 3D, and Mtv music videos. But because he is more interested in conceptual surfaces than he is his actors the emotional impact of Fitzgerald’s story never really hits as hard as we know it should.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2013