The Great Gatsby

 
I have not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in many years.  I remember it only vaguely- I know the outline of the story, recall a heavy use of symbolism, and for some reason can recite the final line, the bit about the boats and the current the past, word for word- but for the most part I treat it as one of those books I know is considered great, but about which I don’t remember enough to explain why.

I remember Moulin Rogue!, though, the 2001 jukebox musical featuring late 19th Century Parisians singing their hearts out to modern pop songs which went on to delight and bewilder audiences around the world.  Baz Luhrmann, the director of that film, brings a lot of the same high-riding anachronistica to The Great Gatsby, but in this case the material resists him.  He ends up with a movie split down the middle that will be interesting to many but satisfying to few.

Like Moulin Rogue!, this film version of The Great Gatsby begins with a writer remembering the heady days of his not-so-distant past.  He is Nick Carroway (Toby McGuire), and not so long ago he was young, idealistic, and attending sinfully lavish parties thrown by his rich next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  The first half of the movie is dominated by a mighty shindig thrown in and around Gatsby’s sprawling bayside estate.  It’s bombastic and fantastic, a fourteen-cuts-a-second orgiastic liquor volcano kind of party where every guest is done up like a neon peacock and where important characters are introduced with flourishes of Gershwin music.  It’s also one of the duller parts of the movie.  The Great Gatsby is a story with a lot of nuance, and a garishly stylized depiction of jazz age opulence featuring songs from Beyonce and Jay Z does little to deal with it.  In Moulin Rogue!, the gaudiness was the point.  Here, it’s the prelude to the real story, and quickly wears out its welcome.

The real story, meanwhile, is rich but feels like it should be richer.  Gatsby, who is wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, but oh so alone, pines after upright New York debutante Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), with whom he shared a passionate love affair years before.  She lives across the bay and is unhappily married to the philandering Tom (Joel Edgerton).  Together they are even wealthier than Gatsby, and unlike Gatsby, their money is old.

After Gatsby enlists Nick’s help in a successful bid to reignite his affair with Daisy, the movie all but abandons the extravagance of the first half and settles into a new life as a chamber drama.  The strongest scene occurs in a hotel room where all the principal characters get to air their grievances.  There is no anachronistic music, no voiceover narration, no epileptic editing.  It’s almost disappointingly traditional, but it does a better job of getting to the meat of the story than any of the other thousand-and-one bells and whistles Luhrmann chose to hang all over this gussied-up showhorse of a feature film.

And yet it doesn’t do enough.  The characters, particularly Daisy, still seem underdeveloped, their motivations lacking, and the denouncement leaves us with no deeper insight into Gatsby than that he was a naïve man unlucky in love.  There are other missteps.  The liberal use of Fitzgerald’s text as voiceover narration is occasionally affecting but mostly useless, and the press of Significantly Symbolic Shots would have more heft if we understood what the characters wanted and needed.  Luhrmann wanted to make visually experimental music video about the roaring twenties, and he wanted to adapt The Great Gatsby.  He’s done a little of both, and ended up with neither.