Some Kind of Gatsby

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.