The Great Gatsby: Lost in Adaptation

A discussion of Baz Lurhmann as a film-maker would take far more space than a brief review, but in a nutshell he strikes me as the Thomas Kinkade of the Film Arts community. He uses kitsch, glamour, sound and broad, colorful strokes as misdirection to cover story-telling sins and tap into a kind of populist pathos. He is to Hollywood what Benny Hinn is to religion. The Vox Populi, like the applauding audience at the end of Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge, is pleased by the emotional, hard-pumping razzle, even if it is largely incoherent. Perhaps it's that very incoherence, tapping into non-rational parts of the psyche, that people like in a Luhrmann offering, the cinematic version of glossolalia. In the end, Baz' work is always more about Baz' work than it is about the subject of the film. 

The Great Gatsby has a perhaps inflated reputation as THE American story. Like The Godfather, and now "Mad Men," its claim to iconic space is built on an obsession with the genteel decay and corruption in the urban northeastern corner of the country. For many people, especially the people who live there, New York is America. For those of us who grew up on Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, it ain't. We've got our own class of genteel decay to obsess over, thank you very much. And it doesn't look like yours. Stories like Gatsby masquerade as morality tales, but the focus is not really on the morality, is it? 

Interestingly, H.L. Mencken's review of Gatsby, coming from Chicago, was less than flattering. (Take a moment to read the review. You won't be sorry.) Nevertheless, the forced reading of Gatsby in the nation's high schools, dating from somewhere around the '50s from what I hear, has given the work a privileged place in the minds of the general public that actually grants it a status few other cultural artifacts can claim in a world as digitally fragmented as ours. The consensus, after previous failed film attempts, has been that the literary flavor of Fitzgerald's work, featuring his elegant economical style and his nuanced flare for expression, cannot be translated to film. The challenge for a film-maker is to produce an adaptation that either captures in image what words express or to create a vision so definitive that it competes with and/or replaces the original (Ben Hur, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan). Baz Luhrmann does not succeed in either category with this version. 

Tobey Maquire looks and feels the part of Nick Carraway, but misfires terribly in the narration, which is fatally over-used by Luhrmann in this film (a basic no-no against which film-makers are frequently warned but to which they are all-too susceptible). Lurhmann's visuals luxuriate in the revels at Gatsby's estate, an almost lovingly celebratory depiction that takes on the style of a rave with the anachronistic music (another Lurhmann trademark) and deliberately off-pace scene cuts. In doing so, he defies the tone of the original Fitzgerald muse, but again, this is nothing new for Lurhmann. Like Tim Burton, he seems convinced that his prevailing artistic sense is best. 

In this version, Elizabeth Debicki's portrayal of Jordan Baker--an already shallow character in the book--becomes almost transparently insubstantial. She stands out literally only because she is so much taller than Nick. The same can be said for Isla Fisher's Myrtle, who gets the most visual attention when suspended over the car in slow-motion. Lurhmann seems more informed than he should be by Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film script--he wants to make the Gatsby story about star-crossed lovers. So he shoe-horns scenes and dialog and images to give us the flowering romance that Fitzgerald himself failed to give. While DiCaprio and Mulligan are well-cast, their performances, maybe aided by the fantasy-land ambience of the film's art direction, seem as though they are pretending to be pretending. Even so, they hit far many more true notes than Redford and Farrow managed in the 1974 vehicle. Joel Edgerton as Buchanan is a force to be reckoned with in the film, delivering a solid performance that only fails in that it's a poor adaptation from the book. The standout performance is that of Jason Clarke as George Wilson. No actor managed to pour more soul into such a tiny share of a role. 

A factor looming in this spectacle is the art design. Lurhmann's films seem to have moved toward tighter control of this aspect of his work, relying heavily on green screen cgi backgrounds. Used judiciously, these might have worked, but as the movie developed they began to assume the appearance of theatrical backdrops. These and the relentless parade of meticulously manicured set pieces--even the ash was carefully arranged--give the whole a stylized glare.

Nevertheless, the film may do for Gatsby what Lurhmann did for Romeo and Juliet--it will become the school-age movie version that everyone will now watch. It will doubtless make its way into the collective subconscious of the American public for the next decade or more, regardless of its merits and/or flaws. What better way to ensure immortality in the minds and hearts of the masses? But from a critical standpoint, like the afore-mentioned Romeo and Juliet, this film is more about Lurhmann's take than it is about the original. And that, for what it's worth, won't matter.