Baz Luhrmann (2013)
Baz Luhrmann’s determination to make everything spectacular and dramatic in The Great Gatsby is often counterproductive. The drapes at the East Egg home of Tom and Daisy Buchanan are already billowing vigorously at the start of the scene in which Jay Gatsby, or the mention of him, re-enters Daisy’s life. As a result, there’s no scope for using the movement of the curtains to suggest a profound change of current in the room when she hears his name. Every sequence involving motor cars looks liable to end in a crash: this may be meant to anticipate what happens in the climax but it runs the risk of lessening the impact of the eventual fatal accident – and Luhrmann gets out of this bind only by staging Myrtle Wilson’s death so that it’s less a hit-and-run accident than an existential flourish. (Given what Myrtle means in the story, this makes little sense.) When Nick Carraway phones the Buchanans’ house before Gatsby’s funeral, the scene might be effective if the place were deserted but Tom and Daisy, in spite of what their butler tells Nick, are still on the premises, and acting furtive and nasty. Nick, when he makes the call, is standing at the top of a staircase in Gatsby’s mansion – press vultures are clustered around Gatsby’s coffin in the entrance hall miles below. Some of the party sequences are well staged but they’re relentlessly climactic: they include firework displays to eclipse the finale of a present-day Olympic ceremony. No one can mention the war without a flashback to Gatsby in army gear superimposed over archive footage of massed ranks of soldiery. Lines from the book, or from what Nick Carraway is writing (see below), appear on the screen every so often – they are mere decoration.
The unyielding hyperactivity has probably helped the film at the box office and Luhrmann to succeed – as he has said he wanted to succeed – in getting a young audience to enjoy Gatsby. It’s insulting to imply that none of the young will have read and enjoyed the book (a quick reader could get through it in the time it takes to watch the film, which runs 143 minutes) – but there’s no denying that the strength of the story and Luhrmann’s attention-getting (and -keeping) technique combine to produce a cinematic hybrid which those new to The Great Gatsby may well find exciting. I didn’t mind the use of Kanye West etc to score the action. What’s irritating (and typical of Luhrmann) is the use of twenty-first century music plus songs in period plus Rhapsody in Blue, which hadn’t been written in 1922, when the story is set. The linking of the Jazz Age to the (allegedly) hectic boom years immediately before the economic crisis of 2008 is much less in evidence than the hype for the film would have led you to fear. But Luhrmann’s realisation of an age of excess isn’t helped by visual bombast even in the occasional images of social deprivation. I’m relieved that we saw The Great Gatsby in 2D rather than 3D although some details were obviously designed for the latter – not only the hurtling zooms but, as Sally pointed out, Gatsby’s hand stretching across the water that divides West Egg from East Egg, towards the green light and the unattainable. The digitised look of everything tends to neutralise the action emotionally and Luhrmann, in describing the hedonism of Gatsby’s party guests, is so intent on creating flashy pictures that it’s hard to get a sense of anything going on that’s actually pleasurable. The eyes of God are reflected in dizzying perspectives rather than from the oculist’s poster (which is nevertheless overused in the closing stages).
Leonardo DiCaprio’s playing of Gatsby has attracted a lot of praise; it is one of his more successful efforts although I’m not sure how much that’s down to skill. There’s a connection between the character of Gatsby and the actor playing him here: a sense that something’s missing, in spite of elaborate attempts to disguise the fact; a resonance between Gatsby’s money-can’t-buy-you-class Achilles heel and the evidence that, no matter how many major roles he gets to play, DiCaprio will never be a great actor. (Perhaps he has qualities that are lost on a British viewer: his reputation in America seems to be a good deal higher than it is over here.) Baz Luhrmann makes things more difficult for DiCaprio by emphasising – and encouraging his star to emphasise – Gatsby’s unease and his anxiety that he’ll be found out. Gatsby’s first meeting with Daisy is played as nearly farcical comedy. The actors are then asked to make too sudden a transition to mutual infatuation and the effect is clumsy. Some of DiCaprio’s best bits are light-hearted moments – such as enjoying himself when Gatsby is throwing his shirts in the air at the peak of his courtship of Daisy. DiCaprio does have, as David Denby said in his review of the film, ‘a golden glow’ but there’s no sustained contrast between the parts of Gatsby’s life in which he’s relaxed and confident and those in which he struggles to get what he wants. As a businessman, DiCaprio’s Gatsby has no authority and, as always with this actor, he can’t express anger convincingly – there’s nothing coming from inside. DiCaprio is almost the polar opposite of Robert Redford who, in Jack Clayton’s 1974 movie, was too classy but able to show an anxious intelligence behind Gatsby’s charm. Leonardo DiCaprio is ultimately bland. When things come to a head between Gatsby and Tom in the New York City hotel suite, Nick says in his voiceover that the look on Gatsby’s face at this moment showed that he could have, as he’s reputed to have done, ‘killed a man’. DiCaprio’s expression says otherwise and summarises his limitations. Who could have played Gatsby this time around? I’d have liked to see Michael Fassbender have a go.
As Nick, Tobey Maguire is also completely different from the actor who played the role in the Clayton film. Here, Nick’s naïveté is too obvious in the early stages and Maguire gives him a gee-whiz look of wonderment. Sam Waterston’s watchful intelligence, however, would have made no sense in the world Baz Luhrmann creates, and he does Maguire no more favours than he does DiCaprio. Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, with whom he did the adaptation, present the narrative as a tale told by a recovering alcoholic in a sanatorium. This framing device is cheap, trading as it does on F Scott Fitzgerald’s drink problems, and the sanatorium scenes are a lost cause – badly written and, in the case of Jack Thompson as Nick’s psychiatrist, badly overplayed. Some of Nick’s voiceover is superfluous: he merely describes what we can see on the screen. But Tobey Maguire improves as the film goes on, and the souring effect of what happens on the appealing, eccentric personality that he gives Nick Carraway begins to register.
I’m starting to wonder if, as well as being blind to the gifts of Leonardo DiCaprio, I can’t read American class differences. This is the second Gatsby adaptation running in which Tom Buchanan is a brutal slob and it’s hard to believe he’s more than one social cut above ‘poor boy’ Jay Gatsby (and this in spite of the fact that DiCaprio’s Gatsby’s patently lacks class). Apart from the moment in the hotel when Tom forces Daisy to admit she did once love him, Joel Edgerton, like Bruce Dern before him, is monotonous in the role. Jason Clarke, although nowhere near as strong as Scott Wilson in the 1974 film, is adequate as the garage owner George Wilson. Karen Black was probably too powerful as Clayton’s Myrtle – too challenging for Tom – but she was streets ahead of Isla Fisher, who delivers a type rather than an individual. There’s a nonsensical moment when Myrtle is introduced to Nick and turns away from him before she’s even completed a handshake. If she’s meant to do this through avidity for Tom, the moment is badly botched by Fisher and Luhrmann: they make the turning away seem socially dismissive (and, as such, bizarre). Fisher isn’t believably desperate in Myrtle’s final rush from the garage – she’s merely melodramatic. (The early scene involving Tom, Nick, Myrtle, her sister et al is an example of the director’s self-defeating overkill – the cramped apartment and the shoddy lewdness of the gathering are lost because the scene is so falsely dynamic.) Elizabeth Debicki plays Jordan Baker in a stylised, almost camp way but her height is right and, like Maguire, she gets better. Luhrmann himself appears momentarily as a waiter.
Carey Mulligan is the best reason for seeing The Great Gatsby. She can look very beautiful when dressed very simply so the headdresses etc don’t always show her to advantage but her characterisation is spot on: this is the fourth film in which I’ve seen Mulligan and the fourth in which she’s given an excellent performance. Mia Farrow’s Daisy was neurasthenic but there are moments when Mulligan’s voice is almost startlingly deep and strong: her wilting melancholy is touching but it’s also part of Daisy’s wilfulness. For those who know the story, this Daisy is always persuasively ambivalent – enough to persuade Gatsby that she returns his love. For those who aren’t familiar with The Great Gatsby, Daisy’s admission in the stifling New York hotel must be shocking. When Gatsby’s shirts are flying through the air and he asks Daisy why she’s crying, she replies that she’s never seen such beautiful shirts – and it may well be the beauty of expensive clothing that moves her to tears. (Baz Luhrmann slightly weakens the moment by concentrating on the image of the shirts so that Gatsby is, too obviously, relegated to the background.) Nevertheless, Daisy’s reply epitomises her emotional spontaneity and her spoilt selfishness – two sides of the same coin. Carey Mulligan delivers the line perfectly.
19 May 2013
