People seem to have largely made up their minds about Baz Luhrmann one way or the other (and I am not exempt) so I’m not exactly expecting to win any hearts and minds here. I thought that The Great Gatsby was splendid, muscular, poignant, and authentic. And subtly challenging.
Many of the critical objections seem to be rough matters of taste. So Cara Nash writes glowingly of the music “which exchanges the subversive sounds of jazz that soundtracked the decadent twenties with the swagger of hip-hop, and all the excess and bling that it alludes to,” while Connie Ogle says that “the union doesn’t work.” Richard Roeper says that Cary Mulligan “crafts an intricately detailed performance” which Christopher Orr describes as “a minor disaster.” The 3D? Personally, I found it to be electrical; I’m in the clear minority there.
Anyway, on such questions I typically judged in the movie’s favor, but I can at least understand the other point-of-view.
The one complaint of Luhrmann’s Gatsby that rings completely false to me is that it was too shallow and superficial to plumb the social and psychological depths of Fitzgerald’s masterwork. Please.
My high-school experience reading Gatsby in one short paragraph: I liked jazz music and knew that this book was “about” the jazz age, so I was excited to read it. When I got into the book, I realized it was about some parties and tawdry affairs by rich assholes, and I stopped caring. But I kept going because it was required reading, and short, and eventually I found out that those tawdry affairs covered a determined illusion and a profound vulnerability. Maybe such self-delusion is universal, or maybe it is a trapping of class and culture, but it is the photo negative of “American optimism.” Which is to say, we want too much (recognition, wealth, opportunity, power) without honestly confronting the physical and psychic costs of such wanting. At least that’s an implied thesis of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and a good reason why it is a great American novel, and one that might seem more applicable today than some of the best writing of Hemingway and Faulkner.
The Great Gatsby — the Great American Novel — is shallow and glitzy and superficial. Or so it must seem until we readers squint our eyes and look for something moving in the background. A world of “bizarre and not a little sinister contrast.” In which “there was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously… A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz… a pair of stage ‘twins’… did a baby act in costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.” We have to get through this before we can appreciate the awful frailty and contradiction, much less “one fine morning” near the end. If we’re looking for fealty to the source material, the fealty of the spirit is the most important, and in this sense Luhrman’s is the most faithful adaptation.
A casual viewer might confuse that CGI searing green light, blinking on and off, with the confetti and the flatulent trumpets, but look closely and its really there. The depth of the book is the depth of the film. Like it or hate it, allow it that.
Anyway, as I said I probably am not convincing anyone. We’ve all made our minds up about Mr. Luhrmann. But maybe you’ll at least enjoy this: