While Carey Mulligan simpers, Leonardo DiCaprio smoulders
Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby isn’t great, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s sure is It’s always a tough task to review something so close to your heart. The Great Gatsby is easily the greatest American novel of the 20th century and my favourite book next to The Bible. The prose is so exquisite that even writing about it here feels like
an act of defilement – how can anyone capture the essence of a novel so sublime that some of the sentences sing like poetry written in absinthe? “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” narrator Nick Carraway writes of Jay Gatsby’s parties. “And I like large parties,” breathes Jordan Baker, the woman golfer. “They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” The Great Gatsby contains many such great truths – of which the greatest is the fleeting nature of experience. Gatsby loved Daisy Buchanan once (or did he just rape her?) and is now determined to spend a fortune trying to recapture that moment – to reach out to the summer sun and hold it back forever. He fails to make Daisy love him again, but we fall in love with Gatsby for trying.
Baz Luhrmann loves Gatsby a bit too much, which is why his movie version misses the whole point of the book. Gatsby isn’t really great: he’s a fraud, possibly a gangster, very much an obsessive deluded by a lie. He isn’t much to look at either, which is why, in the novel, Carraway doesn’t realise that he’s sitting next to his host at one of his own parties until Gatsby introduces himself. When Luhrmann reproduces that awkward moment he has Gatsby revealed grandly in front of fireworks with Rhapsody in Blue exploding all around him. It could be an ad for a perfume: Indulgence Pour Homme.
The director sees too much to admire in Gatsby’s lifestyle. Scott Fitzgerald intended his decadence to be a moral indictment of the vacuous jazz age, but Luhrmann has no hangups about having fun – so the parties are bigger, the drink freerer and the women more exotic than they are even in the novel. The first third of Luhrmann's Gatsby is a celebration of excess, a great irony considering that excess is what Fitzgerald was satirising. The men don’t just drive their cars, they race them through the screen and right-atcha (Gatsby rides an angry yellow bee in 3D!). And our hero lives in the house that Walt Disney built out of CGI.
The cast looks lost among the special effects, drowned out by this rolling advertisement for silk and diamonds. Not only did I not fall in love with Daisy, every time Carey Mulligan’s face stretched out of the screen to simper inches from my nose I harbored a strong desire to reach back out into the pixels and give her a gentle slap. She is boring, the parties laboured, the music silly (Back to Black as a foxtrot), and everybody works too hard to look like they are having a good time. If I lived next door to Luhrmann’s Gatsby house I’d call the police and complain about the noise.
But then, a miracle occurs: Leonardo DiCaprio appears on screen. Whereas Luhrmann gives the impression of not having read the novel through to the end (it does contain a lot of long words), DiCaprio understands and embodies his role. His Gatsby is good to look at (enough to eat, in fact) but conscious that it’s all an artifice. Two scenes that work especially well: one, Gatsby flees the cottage before meeting Daisy, hides in the rain, and then walks back in dripping wet. He’s not a class act but a klutz – not an aristo in linen but a little boy with a crush. Two, Gatsby confronts Daisy’s husband and his gangster id takes over. JG rolls with Tom Buchanan’s verbal punches and then explodes with fury – a terrifying moment that leaves the audience as breathless as the characters. Crucially, these are scenes where Luhrmann has expanded upon the text in partnership with DiCaprio's instincts as an actor. Here the innovation works and it works because it feels spontaneous, it feels real – in contrast with Luhrmann's overly choreographed follies.
Indeed, by attacking Luhrmann's direction I'm not making the case that the only good adaptation is a literal one. That can be equally disastrous. The 1974 Gatsby was so deferential that it felt like a study aide, and Robert Redford played Gatsby with such respect that his restrained performance was reminiscent of a mannequin. Thomas Wolfe wrote, “I'll never forgive the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him.” By contrast, DiCaprio’s performance is so vivid and real that he fairly bursts through the seams of his pretty pink suit. This is Gatsby as I’ve always imagined him: a man who wears his own face as an ill-fitting disguise.
No, the central problem with Luhrmann's film is that it isn't motored by Fitzgerald's moral outrage. A similar mistake was made when Stephen Fry adapted Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies as Bright Young Things in 2003. The name change was significant: Waugh found the misbehaviour of his Twenties characters "vile" – Fry found all the drug taking, sleeping around and boozing "bright". How our societies have degraded. Likewise, Luhrmann looks at Gatsby in 2013 and sees much to admire, turning his life story into some lurid Las Vegas fantasy.
DiCaprio's understanding of JG is vastly superior because he sees the violence and narcissism that motivate Gatsby's unobtainable desires. Little Leo saves the movie and gives us a reason to want to pick up the novel again – and try to recapture our own golden memories of first reading it. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…"
an act of defilement – how can anyone capture the essence of a novel so sublime that some of the sentences sing like poetry written in absinthe? “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” narrator Nick Carraway writes of Jay Gatsby’s parties. “And I like large parties,” breathes Jordan Baker, the woman golfer. “They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” The Great Gatsby contains many such great truths – of which the greatest is the fleeting nature of experience. Gatsby loved Daisy Buchanan once (or did he just rape her?) and is now determined to spend a fortune trying to recapture that moment – to reach out to the summer sun and hold it back forever. He fails to make Daisy love him again, but we fall in love with Gatsby for trying.
Baz Luhrmann loves Gatsby a bit too much, which is why his movie version misses the whole point of the book. Gatsby isn’t really great: he’s a fraud, possibly a gangster, very much an obsessive deluded by a lie. He isn’t much to look at either, which is why, in the novel, Carraway doesn’t realise that he’s sitting next to his host at one of his own parties until Gatsby introduces himself. When Luhrmann reproduces that awkward moment he has Gatsby revealed grandly in front of fireworks with Rhapsody in Blue exploding all around him. It could be an ad for a perfume: Indulgence Pour Homme.
The director sees too much to admire in Gatsby’s lifestyle. Scott Fitzgerald intended his decadence to be a moral indictment of the vacuous jazz age, but Luhrmann has no hangups about having fun – so the parties are bigger, the drink freerer and the women more exotic than they are even in the novel. The first third of Luhrmann's Gatsby is a celebration of excess, a great irony considering that excess is what Fitzgerald was satirising. The men don’t just drive their cars, they race them through the screen and right-atcha (Gatsby rides an angry yellow bee in 3D!). And our hero lives in the house that Walt Disney built out of CGI.
The cast looks lost among the special effects, drowned out by this rolling advertisement for silk and diamonds. Not only did I not fall in love with Daisy, every time Carey Mulligan’s face stretched out of the screen to simper inches from my nose I harbored a strong desire to reach back out into the pixels and give her a gentle slap. She is boring, the parties laboured, the music silly (Back to Black as a foxtrot), and everybody works too hard to look like they are having a good time. If I lived next door to Luhrmann’s Gatsby house I’d call the police and complain about the noise.
But then, a miracle occurs: Leonardo DiCaprio appears on screen. Whereas Luhrmann gives the impression of not having read the novel through to the end (it does contain a lot of long words), DiCaprio understands and embodies his role. His Gatsby is good to look at (enough to eat, in fact) but conscious that it’s all an artifice. Two scenes that work especially well: one, Gatsby flees the cottage before meeting Daisy, hides in the rain, and then walks back in dripping wet. He’s not a class act but a klutz – not an aristo in linen but a little boy with a crush. Two, Gatsby confronts Daisy’s husband and his gangster id takes over. JG rolls with Tom Buchanan’s verbal punches and then explodes with fury – a terrifying moment that leaves the audience as breathless as the characters. Crucially, these are scenes where Luhrmann has expanded upon the text in partnership with DiCaprio's instincts as an actor. Here the innovation works and it works because it feels spontaneous, it feels real – in contrast with Luhrmann's overly choreographed follies.
Indeed, by attacking Luhrmann's direction I'm not making the case that the only good adaptation is a literal one. That can be equally disastrous. The 1974 Gatsby was so deferential that it felt like a study aide, and Robert Redford played Gatsby with such respect that his restrained performance was reminiscent of a mannequin. Thomas Wolfe wrote, “I'll never forgive the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him.” By contrast, DiCaprio’s performance is so vivid and real that he fairly bursts through the seams of his pretty pink suit. This is Gatsby as I’ve always imagined him: a man who wears his own face as an ill-fitting disguise.
No, the central problem with Luhrmann's film is that it isn't motored by Fitzgerald's moral outrage. A similar mistake was made when Stephen Fry adapted Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies as Bright Young Things in 2003. The name change was significant: Waugh found the misbehaviour of his Twenties characters "vile" – Fry found all the drug taking, sleeping around and boozing "bright". How our societies have degraded. Likewise, Luhrmann looks at Gatsby in 2013 and sees much to admire, turning his life story into some lurid Las Vegas fantasy.
DiCaprio's understanding of JG is vastly superior because he sees the violence and narcissism that motivate Gatsby's unobtainable desires. Little Leo saves the movie and gives us a reason to want to pick up the novel again – and try to recapture our own golden memories of first reading it. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…"
