The Great Gatsby (2013)

Few will deny that in order to adapt The Great Gatsby correctly, there is going to need to be a significant amount of style involved. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel has been filmed many times before for either film or television, but none of them have been able to strike just the right tone. These adaptations, for the most part, have been played right down the middle. They took the book and put it on the screen without taking very many chances. Because of this, Baz Luhrmann deserves a great deal of credit for sticking his neck out as much as he has with his take on The Great Gatsby. Not only does he lay on his signature Moulin Rouge!-type style as thick as possible, but he also comes to the conclusion that what this legendary piece of literature needed was a soundtrack that featured the likes of Jay-Z, Fergie, will.i.am, Lana Del Ray and more. Does his gambit pay off? The short answer: not really. The longer answer: while he is able to create some effectively slick moments, the emotion and thematics of The Great Gatsby only really come through when Luhrmann decides to strip all the extra stuff away and let the actors go to work. These scenes are a precious few, however, and too often it feels as if the spectacle and the story are working independently of each other.

I assume most of you have read The Great Gatsby at some point, but based on many of the conversations I overheard coming out of this screening I may be assuming incorrectly. (I'm not even sure some of these people knew it was a book.) Leonardo DiCaprio is the eponymous millionaire, and while no one seems entirely sure who he is or where he comes from he frequently throws gigantic, flashy parties at his Long Island mansion. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a stockbroker who moves into a small cottage next door, and in the time he spends with Gatsby and the equally wealthy Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) he slowly finds himself drawn into their world of drunken debauchery. The focus quickly turns to Gatsby’s romantic life, and it turns out he has long been attracted to Tom’s wife/Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan). From there the secrets of all the characters are slowly revealed, and most of these secrets involve a mechanic (Jason Clarke), his wife (Isla Fisher) and a gangster in downtown New York City (Amitabh Bachchan).

Any Great Gatsby adaptation is going to have its party montages, and how you respond to Luhrmann’s here are going to dictate more or less how you feel about the film as a whole. These are not just drunken shindigs where a bunch of flappers dance to some "provocative" jazz. The film does away with any real sense of period appropriateness, and these sequences are mostly scored by electronic dance music and contributions from several modern-day artists. For instance, multiple songs from the Kanye West/Jay-Z album Watch the Throne are featured prominently here, which isn’t a huge surprise considering Jay-Z himself executive produced the soundtrack. Oddly enough, one of the best uses of anachronistic music in the film is the Watch the Throne track “Who Gon Stop Me.” It turns up in an early scene, and it’s a mesmerizing montage in which Nick is slowly seduced by the less-than-Christian lifestyle of Tom Buchanan. At that point I was ready to buy in, but unfortunately Luhrmann is unable to capture this magic again. Modern music turns up dozens of times throughout The Great Gatsby, but it usually feels empty at best and actively distracting at worst. When you’re portraying one of Gatsby’s legendary parties, the film Project X is not something you want the audience to be recalling.

For all the frustrating superficial flaws, the actors cannot be faulted here. Nick is a thankless role in any filmed version of The Great Gatsby, as he if forced to be the blank slate/audience surrogate through which we enter this insane world. The film attempts to give him some weight by throwing in an unnecessary framing device through which the main story is told, but that doesn’t really help matters. Despite all this, Maguire does a fine enough job portraying Nick, and he has one heck of a goofy drunk face. The problem is that he isn’t asked to do very much, and this is never clearer than in a climactic scene where all the drama is coming to a head and all he can do is simply stand on the sidelines, barely in the frame. This is one of the film’s best scenes because of its lack of any extra bells and whistles, but it does highlight the challenge of making the Nick character even mildly interesting when we’re looking at him from the outside as filmgoers. In book form you can get away with that, because we’re right there with him.

Much of the attention here will go to DiCaprio, and rightfully so. This had the potential to be a stoic, unimpressive performance, but he is able to find the nuances in his character that other actors might have missed. He’s also able to pull off some genuinely funny moments here, which makes it two films in a row he hasn’t played someone who is utterly humorless. That has to be a record. Everyone else does precisely their job and not a whole lot more, though I will give Edgerton credit for mostly nailing Buchanan’s particular form of sliminess.

My ultimate reaction to The Great Gatsby is actually quite similar to my thoughts on Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, though for slightly different reasons. Both films are adaptations of great material, and the scripts are mostly very strong. Yet in each case the projects were significantly, though not fatally, harmed by their directors. Hooper wanted to make his film intimate and “artistic” while also creating moments of grandiosity, and the result was occasionally maddening. It worked in the case of “I Dreamed a Dream,” but it ran out of gas quick. Baz Luhrmann wants to go the other way with The Great Gatsby. He want to take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tale of the Roaring Twenties and the American dream and give it a sense of spectacle. Both filmmakers went too far down their respective rabbit holes, and they were unable to connect their unique senses of style to the actual material they were directing. Still, the best thing I can say about Luhrmann’s work is that I probably had far more fun watching his Gatsby than any of the other adaptations I’ve been exposed to. It’s a frustrating film, but it’s made with an undeniable passion and desire to do something unexpected and different with material that most literate people are familiar with. It’s an admirable, though slightly misguided goal.

Grade: B-