I admit it. I went to see The Great Gatsby with a critique already in mind. So I was surprised to find the film did not entirely live down to my expectations. Yes, Baz Luhrmann is meretricious, grossly untouching and obsessed with his ow...
I admit it. I went to see The Great Gatsby with a critique already in mind. So I was surprised to find the film did not entirely live down to my expectations. Yes, Baz Luhrmann is meretricious, grossly untouching and obsessed with his own product rather than the story he is telling. But beneath the metre-thick veneer of this new film there are strong performances and a well-written screenplay desperate to get out. If you can, for a moment, look beyond the glaring surface, you might perceive a green light glimmer of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragedy desperate to get out.Luhrmann is fanatical about gloss. This adaptation is no different, offering a riot of fishnets, moonshine and thumping dance tracks. He rips off Woody Allen's Manhattan with his firework-plus-Gershwin combo – ignoring that Rhapsody in Blue was written in 1924, two years after the action of Fitzgerald's book – while the party scenes have all taste worthy of the gay wedding in the appalling second Sex and the City film. Worse still is the CGI rendering of 1920s New York and its environs. The digitised panning shots and sepia montages render the characters and landscape artificial. It's claustrophobic and all desperately unreal.Of course this could be a huge metaphor for the house-of-cards life of Jay Gatsby, who has invented his identity and built his reputation and finances on precarious alcoholic stock. Yet Luhrmann seems deaf and blind to such ironies. Nick Carroway's house, next door to Gatsby's mansion, is similarly primped and preened, a showcase of art nouveau masterpieces that his professed $80 a month simply could not buy. The sanatorium in which Nick finds himself narrating this tale is likewise picture-postcard perfect. Even the Valley of Ashes, the grubby industrial crossroads between Manhattan and Long Island, is so souped-up that it turns into an insensitive parody of down-at-heel Americana. 30 minutes in to Luhrmann's excessive essay on excess you wonder whether the screen will explode – and I had steered clear of the 3D version!Ultimately all this gloss shows a woeful mistrust of the story Luhrmann has chosen to tell and the actors he has employed to tell it. Tobey Maguire proves a touching Nick, genuinely concerned about Gatsby, as he's drawn into the glories of West Egg. He's largely passive in the film, wowed and mystified in equal measure. This may step away from Fitzgerald's egotistical intention, but it allows Leonardo di Caprio's nuanced performance as Gatsby to shine.Slightly weathered with the years, Di Caprio is able to show the chinks in Gatsby's armour. His confrontation with Tom Buchanan (a suitably dislikable Joel Edgerton) has true ferocity, though it clamours to register amidst Luhrmann's claustrophobic setting. As Daisy, the object of their affections, Carey Muligan balances joy and melancholy, vacillating between the two as she does the men in her life. Her indecision proves her most dangerous attribute, to which Gatsby is ultimately blind and blinded.Even with Gatsby and Daisy's otherwise touching love scenes, however, Luhrmann smothers emotion with over-lavish scoring and detailing that would make Franco Zeffirelli blush. What Maguire, Di Caprio, Edgerton and Muligan register as genuine, Luhrmann synthesises to the point of plastic and, far from concealing Gatsby's incorruptible dream, he brandishes it in stultifying CGI, Jay-Z rapping, lifeless glory. Not once does Luhrmann critique his own approach, providing metacinematic clout to this brash imago. That proves the real tragedy here.
