Yesterday I bought an audiobook of The Great Gatsby for $11.95. Tonight I saw the movie for a similar
price. I don’t doubt that you’ll be able to tell which experience I preferred.
Luhrmann’s Gatsby
bears all the hallmarks of his other movies: a sociopathic, almost manic
momentum, a lavish production design, and a painstaking insistence that
contemporary music is essential to making a classic accessible. I’m going to
lead with the areas in which I thought the movie succeeded, since that takes a
little more effort. It’s easy to pan an adaptation of a literary masterpiece,
so I’m resisting the inclination.
Leo and Carey are a good Gatsby and Daisy, but she’s
particularly good. It’s not an easy formula to assemble—privilege, grace, and
an innocent irreverence all have to be tempered by a growing vulnerability and
guilt about who she is. Ms. Mulligan navigates it with ease. Leo has his own
moments to shine, which I thought he handled with admirable understatement, but
don’t expect any new tricks you haven’t seen before. He calls often on his BA
in Brow-furrowing, which he seems to think an honorary MFA in Acting.
The script (adapted by Luhrmann and
some-guy-he-likes-to-write-with) does manage to capture the Gatsby-Daisy
relationship, with particular emphasis on Gatbsy’s obsessive need to decisively
erase the five years they lost while she was married to Tom. In some ways, if
you can get that dynamic right, then everything else about the story falls into
place. Luhrmann’s managed to pinpoint the important lines of the novel and fit
them into the movie, even if his interpretation of them is questionable.
The costumes are gorgeous, the sets impressive, and every
inch of the screen occupied by artifacts and wonders from the 20s, but I have
to say that the way in which they’re displayed (i.e. editing, camera movement)
does an injustice to the artistry of the design, not to mention the characters
and nuance of the story. Luhrmann’s attention deficit—which he assumes his
audience shares—doesn’t let a single iconic line breathe between jump cuts,
cut-aways, and hip-hop tracks. He must subscribe to Jordan Baker’s innocuous
comment that a large party is more intimate than a small one (spoiler
alert—it’s not true). As a result, the whole package comes across as a
two-and-a-half-hour attempt at inducing a heart attack. It worked in Moulin
Rouge, but it doesn’t here.
Fitzgerald’s genius is in his ability to replicate the
mystery of meeting someone new when he introduces his characters. There’s
something enthralling about them, because it’s through their unconscious
actions that you come to know them intimately over the course of the novel.
Luhrmann makes the mistake of pegging characters from the very first moment you
meet them, as if he’s afraid that some of their secrets might be lost on the
guy dropping off in the back row. It makes them caricaturish and uninteresting.
Jordan, Tom, Myrtle, her sister, and Wolfsheim suffer the most at the hands of
this fallacy. The treatment of their character development reminded me of the
year I found out what all my brothers’ Christmas presents were and couldn’t
help pronouncing the information just before they commenced unwrapping them
(“That’s the race car you wanted…That’s a batman figure! He goes underwater!”
or, in this case, “That’s the loose mistress! That’s her loose sister!”).
Sometimes you like to unwrap your own presents.
Of course, the characterizations in the novel formulate
through the lens of Nick Carraway, our narrator. Because they’re his
observations we’re reading, making a movie that attains any level of the book’s
ingenuity requires an actor who can match Fitzgerald’s own wit, insight, and
talent for withholding judgment. Tobey Maguire doesn’t come close. In case you
haven’t seen any of his movies, he’s the 10-year-old in grown-up clothes.
Despite his apocryphal declaration at the top of the movie that he “looks for
the good in people,” his main activity throughout most of the film is to cast
disapproving looks at other characters. He brings the depth and maturity of a
vegetative eunuch.
But it’s Luhrmann’s fault, not only for casting him, but for
missing the moral center of the story. He can’t seem to decide if the
extravagant parties, the drinking, the sex, the excesses of an over privileged
generation are good or bad. It’s all glorified throughout the movie (along with
a healthy dose of executive producer Jay-Z’s own music—yup, you heard that
right), so that when we’re left to discern the point of the story, we can’t
decipher the argument presented.
The biggest example of this—and my most significant
complaint about the movie—is that (spoiler alert?) Gatsby and Daisy have sex.
Admittedly, the novel doesn’t specify that they don’t, but I personally consider
it essential that their relationship remains unconsummated. And not just for
the considerable romantic tension it creates. Gatsby’s distinct from the Long
Island aristocracy, the wealthy crowd he’s trying to infiltrate. He’s “worth
the whole bunch of them put together” precisely because he never commits adultery. He wants to do everything right.
This is the guy that wouldn’t even invite Daisy to tea, let alone attempt to rebuild
their relationship on the foundation of a betrayal. The belief that he can pull
it off is a delusion, of course, but it’s a delusion that’s central to the
story.
Once that happened, I knew what Luhrmann’s trouble was. To
him, love is sex. And yet he delightfully uses sexuality to paint the flappers
as aimless and perverse. It sends a mixed message. The excesses of the 1920s really
pale in comparison to those of our time, though, so in order to appropriately shock
us, Luhrmann has to amp up the moral deterioration to notch 11. He turns the
party at Myrtle’s sister’s into an all-night heroin bender (actually, they’re
drinking…champagne?) with everyone flailing in their underwear watching the
neighbors have sex. If you pay attention, Gatsby
is a very moral book, but it manages to be so with a healthy lack of
self-righteousness. The movie is morally confused and, ironically,
self-righteous nonetheless.
If nothing else, Luhrmann’s Gatsby serves as an exhaustive compilation of plot spoilers for the
novel. If you don’t fancy just reading the book, pick up the audio version read
by Anthony Heald in the iTunes store. It’s every bit as entertaining, and not
much longer than the movie itself.
