FILM REVIEWS: The Great Gatsby

After seeing Moulin Rouge, one of the worst ‘movies’ of all time, I was both stupefied and angered to hear the Baz “The Spaz” Luhrmann was going to direct the movie adaptation of one of the great American novels. But I’m happy to report that NO, HE DIDN’T FAIL ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL! WOO-HOO! Sadly, on a less positive note, that’s not exactly a compliment. When the expectation is that a movie will be horrible, and it doesn’t live up to the anustastic piece of shit you imagined it to be, you end up scoring it a little easier. And unfortunately, that’s what seems to have happened here. But that doesn’t make it any less of a shitpile.

The Great Gatsby is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), an aspiring writer in 1922 who moves to New York City in hopes of getting inspiration and possibly a job on Wall Street. However, after moving into a house next to secluded billionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), his life is changed enormously. He attends swanky parties, sleeps around, and basically corrodes his soul with money and everything it can buy. Now, let me say this: Tobey Maguire is a SHIT actor. His speech pattern makes it sound like he’s going to bust into tears at any minute, and his screen presence is basically nonexistent. DiCaprio, fortunately, compensates for Maguire with a strong, level-headed performance that never goes over the top. Unfortunately, none of the other leads are strong enough to carry the film, and it ends up relying far too much on DiCaprio’s bombastic rich guy performance to hold everything up.

Meanwhile, Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic and chaotic direction brings a whole host of problems to the film. He spends far too much time attempting (and often failing) to replicate the feel of the era, and virtually no time at all developing the characters or the plot. For all of the sparkly jazz and visual splendor he throws at us, there’s basically nothing there holding it up. One sequence, in which Maguire and company hire some prostitutes for a pillow fight, is especially frustrating. Not because it’s silly (which it is), but because its only reason for existence is to give Luhrmann a new chance to show off the shit he can do with a camera. He’s a master at set design and cinematography, but pretty much nothing else.

Still, this movie did have some positive aspects-- DiCaprio was good, as I said before, but the whole mythology of his character was very well-treated. The Great Gatsby is a novel about greed, wealth, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely-- three things that the movie definitely hit on. The story itself is heartbreaking and powerful, even if the movie doesn’t quite convey the emotional depth of the novel as well as it should. Really, any movie based off of source material this strong isn’t going to be a TOTAL disaster, as the writers have great things to work with and the actors are given a book they can read that will spell out the depth of their characters (just in case their director sucks). But most of the film’s successes are owed to Fitzgerald’s novel, and not the movie itself. It does nothing original or creative with the story, save for some eye-popping zoom-ins and glittering gold.

The dialogue was all over the map-- at times, it was emotionally resonant and extremely powerful. Sometimes, it was flat-out corny. Joel Edgerton’s lame and generic villain was severely underwritten, and when he did have lines, they were repetitive and boring. Every scene seemed to feature him saying “Daisy is MINE!” Baz Luhrmann must have read the script, then handed it back saying “I like it, but could you make it a little more bland?” The conflict over Daisy (who was played with very little enthusiasm by Carey Mulligan), seemed utterly manufactured and completely unrealistic. Every time the movie tried to make you feel something about the characters, the feelings felt like cookie-cutter emotions-- unoriginal, uninteresting, and not very unique.

Final Score for The Great Gatsby: 4/10 stars. It’s not very good, but it’s certainly one of the better films from Baz Luhrmann, and showcases DiCaprio’s emotional depth as an actor. It does a disservice to the source material, but no more than any of the other Gatsby film adaptations have, so why pick on this one? It’s gimmicky, flawed, and not very involving, but if you’re willing to sacrifice a little substance for a visually awesome telling of a classic story, you will undoubtedly be entertained.