Director: Baz Luhrmann
Talent: Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Toby Maguire, Joel Edgerton
Release Date: 17th May 2013
Up unto this point, cinematic adaptations of The Great Gatsby have failed to do F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age tragedy justice. Of these remakes, the 1974 version (starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola) is the best known and most iconic, and yet it failed to adapt Fitzgerald’s novel in a meaningful or coherent way. 70s Gatsby is a drab affair: even its lavish parties, characteristic of the story’s excess and extremity, come off as dull. Fortunately, Baz Luhrmann’s take on The Great Gatsby cannot be accused of being boring; far from it, the film is a visual and aural smorgasbord of glitter and light shows. However, this razzamatazz comes at a price, and Gatsby, for all its visual richness, has the depth of a drained swimming pool and all the subtlety of a punch to the face.
Luhrmann’s Gatsby is decidedly one-note: its highs are filmed in the same manner as its lows. The director’s technique is one of excess, employing heavy use of slow motion and wide angled lenses. The characters often feel like window-dressing for the film’s elaborate sets, with human bodies making up one cog in a massive, choreographed machine. Gatsby’s spectacle is technically sound, and Luhrmann’s style has come a long way since Moulin Rouge!—which pretended to be a musical, but read more like a music video. Dance sequences and set-pieces are handled well and serve as the best reason to see the film.
It is unfortunate, then, that this visual richness does not support the film’s narrative. Luhrmann films parties and tragedies uniformly, denying a sense of depth or emotional weight. How are we to take a death seriously when it looks like something out of a cabaret? Indeed, the film is not comfortable with the cynicism of Fitzgerald’s novel. All poignancy is robbed from the ending by an insistence on flashbacks to earlier sequences of frivolity and good times, Luhrmann is unable to engage with anything other than the surface, and perhaps that’s okay: it’s a pretty surface, but not enough to do Fitzgerald’s work justice.
