Say a Prayer for the Pretender: The Great Gatsby // Movie Review

I went into the theater to see the latest film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic The Great Gatsby wanting very much to like it.  Unlike a real film critic, I usually only see movies I want to, so am predisposed to liking them walking in.  But this time I went to see a film I normally wouldn't simply because the critics and the press had the long knives out for it way before it even premiered, and so was hoping to be contrarian.  I'd also never seen a movie directed by Baz Luhrmann, out side of a few clips and trailers, and was curious to see the full on hip-hop meets highly stylized period / costume drama mash up that he's known for.

Sad to say; mission very much unaccomplished.  I didn't hate this movie, and it has flashes of greatness, but in the end this is one case where, unlike Oz the Great and Powerful from a few weeks back, I found the negative hype to be pretty much on target.

The movie follows the story of Nick Carraway (yes, Nick Carraway), played by Toby Maguire, a would be writer who tries to make his way in 1922 New York as a bond trader.  He moves into a small cottage on Long Island next to an immense mansion owned by the mysterious "New Money" millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  The story is told in flashbacks during Carraway's sessions with a psychiatrist in a sanatorium (an invention of the film), who encourages him to write it all down.  We find out that Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanon (Carry Mulligan), who married "Old Money" scion Tom Buchanon (Joel Edgerton), just happens to live across the bay.  From Gatsby's pier can be seen a green beacon that sits at the end of the Buchanon estate.  Nick's mysterious neighbor wanders out at night to seemingly reach out to it across the water.  Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's party's, unusual because these weekly bacchanals are open to anyone who wishes to drop in, and finds out all is not what it seems, and things that seem like coincidence are actually very well mapped out contrivances to get Gatsby and Daisy together.  


While the party scenes are certainly over the top, and in general the film represents more of a fantasia on Gatsby then a straight telling of the story (which is all well and good), in the end it really doesn't work.  But I'm not sure that this is completely Luhrmann's fault.  I read Gatsby years ago, and remember the beginning, and remember the end, but the middle is a bit muddled in my head.  And that's a pretty good way to describe this filmed version.  The reality is that not much really happens in the book until the end.  Most of the middle is taken up with dialogue scenes in hotel rooms and sea side cottages that would probably work better on the stage than on the screen.  Luhrmann is a visual director, and as hard as he tries to jazz up the more meditative segments I was still looking at my watch at a certain point.  He would have been better served to go full on fantasia as opposed to mixing the fantastic with an attempt to be faithful to the book.

For all the time spent lingering over our star crossed lovers, the ideas of the book are given short shrift.  We hear about the class distinctions between Old Money and the Nouveau Riche, Tom's white supremacist hogwash, and the corrupt manipulation of the public by hidden powers represented by the gambler Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan), but they are never really fleshed out.  When we get to the end and Nick's stinging condemnation of the Buchanons and their class I'm not sure it will make complete sense to those in the audience who haven't read the book.  Or maybe it is that these themes are so 1920's in nature that the film makers figured their relevance would be lost on today's 18 to 35 year old demographic the movie is targeting, so why bother to get too deep?

Like I wrote, there are flashes of greatness.  The best scene was probably the most low tech: the confrontation between the principals at the Plaza Hotel on a sweltering summer afternoon.  While this is one of those "stagy" parts I wrote about, it was well staged and gave the actors a chance to act and show that they could do more than preen. 

I haven't talked about the 3-D because I don't see that it really mattered, except that it added to the superficiality of the proceedings.  At first I thought that the unreality of the sets, staging and music was  meant to be symbolic of the vacuousness of the period and the emptiness of the character's interior lives, but I'm really not sure.  The Great Gatsby does such a good job being vacant I can't believe it's just a trope.  Sometimes the negative hype is the truth, and unfortunately that's what's going on here.