THE GREAT GATSBY (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)

[tabuno]

First there was the overly confident young punk quick draw in The Quick and the Dead (1995) and of course the major breakthrough as the impoverished heartthrob of Titanic (1997) two years later, and only a year later the fascinating duel role in The Man in the Iron Mask between the innocent, naïve young man and the opulent, narcissistic king. Along with the multi-role characters of Catch Me If You Can (2002), the intensely personal portrait of a secretive life of Howard Hughes in The Aviator in 2004, Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby is bigger than life, just as the movie Titanic he starred in. The captivating, close-up starry and bloodshot eyes of Daisy was immediately spell-binding who starred in one of the most memorable Dr. Who television episodes (2007) as Sally Sparrow. Finally, and the anchor of the movie with his co-starring presence in and his strong voice-over storytelling throughout the movie of Tobey Maguire kept this over-stylized and adult fairytale grounded with substantive insight and figurative almost lyrical narrative that captured the essence of fictional writing. As equally satisfying is Tobey Maguire’s character’s own backstory that begins and ends the movie, echoing the voice over and more hidden presence found in Stand By Me (1986).

The only glaring weaknesses come in the beginning half of the movie where the art design landscape backdrop at one point was too obviously animated in its appearance and the audio track was out of sync with the too apparent impression of the voices being dubbed, oddly in contrast to the criticism that came from the live audio musical singing experienced in Les Miserables (2012).

What was particularly fascinating was the editing and fusion of both movie and novel storytelling along with the incorporation of writing graphics. With the suggestive, visual magic of Moulin Rouge (2001) in the first half, this richly romantic drama brought back the intense relational emotive heart-wrenching story of romantic love that made Titanic so successful. The evolving garishness of this the period drama has similar elements of the culturally explosive backdrop of the romance drama Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the dark richness of the tangled triangular relationship of Interview with a Vampire (1995), the more spiritual fantasy of enduring love in What Dreams May Come (1998) and even DeCaprio’s more recent love interest in Inception (2010).

The romantic connection of intimacy resonates at the same level as the period love drama The Reader (2008) or the ending of If Only (2004), the love epic The English Patient (1996). At the opposite superlative end, just as overly-stylized and hyper-dramatic and over the top as in the musical Chicago (2002) manner or the fascinatingly visual stunning style of the more recent silent love story of The Artist (2011), the French romantic class A Man and A Woman (1966) captured the richness of the direct, black and white emotive simplicity of romantic love. This movie echoes the bigger than life enduring romance found in the Civil War love story of Cold Mountain (2003) or even one of the movie classics of all time Doctor Zhivago (1965). This remake of The Great Gatsby is the stand out movie of the big hits emerging from the 2013 season, making it Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress nominee material in addition to its dazzling cinematography, set designs, and visuals.

[Chris Knipp]

It's odd that you omit mention of WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE? which was what got DiCaprio a very youthful Oscar nomination. I thought he gave a very strong performance also in MARVIN'S ROOM. But oddest of all is your leaving out ROMEN AND JULIET, since that was his former performance in a film by Baz Luhrman. I mean if you're talking about his important early performances and the logic of his involvement in this project. I always find your references odd, and wonder what your ferame of reference actually is. I haven't gotten out to see this yet, hurt my back quite badly and can't handle sitting any length of time. I have only glanced at review ratings, very mixed though going by Metacritic. There may be some technical nominations but I doubt that your high assessment is justified as to Oscars. However, I have heard that DiCaprio's is the best screen Jay Gatsby performance yet, and I hope that is true and can believe it. I love CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, by the way; and in a totally different, much less sophisticated and much more romantic vein, TITANIC.

[tabuno]

Chris has commented on my omission of three movies that DeCaprio performed in from my commentary. He is correct. Since with my limited range of film interest and money and time, I must admit that I haven't seen any of these films that Chris indicated and so I didn't feel competent to really comment on them nor include them in my list, nor did I include some of his most recent performances...I got tired actually. But good catch.

[Chris Knipp]

I pursued DiCaprio very much in his early career, admiring him and his work immensely. I also might mention another bold performance as the outrageous young poet Arrthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse (Agnieszka Holland), The Basketball Diaries, and the early This Boy's Life. Everything he did was notable and striking. TITANIC was the first really conventional thing he did, but it made him famous.

[tabuno]

The Great Gatsby resonates with many lower and middle class Americans who can only dream the fantasy of the American dream, the riches, the luxury, the lavish parties, the famous, the time to just play and have fun a lot of the time. We put on our happy faces, our facades and go to work much like Gatsby himself. We face the torture between romantic love and just living with somebody. We are likely to have regret of choices made, of integrity, loyalty, responsibility versus passionate and abandoned wild pleasure. For many Americans this movie connects with the deeper angst of American living and that dreams that our culture hoisted onto us and the feelings we have long struggled with are given existential visual and auditory existence that we can related to.

Yet the most important element of this movie is the life long pursuit of that perfect love and the sacrifices and the hopes that we dream or had dreamed of before they died that is reflected in this movie, like a Dr. Zhivago love story, perhaps the most potent and deepest of all bittersweet tragedies...or, for some, the brightest, hottest passionate moment of living to have experienced at least once in one's life versus a zombie life of existence.

On a comparative note, Daisy struggles with love in a similar fashion as Mark Ruffalo's character in 13 Going on 30 (2004).

[Chris Knipp]

Maybe what you say is true, but if it is, that the "American dream" is inaccessible to "many lower [sic] and middle class Americans," this is a clearcut sign that this is no longer a democratic country. Because it was precisely in the nature of the American dream that it was accessible to anyone. Obviously it's widely acknowledged now to be true however that the middle class has sunk and no longer can enjoy luxury and leisure or a sense of well being as in the past, in America. But the world of THE GREAT GATSBY is one in which Gatsby himself is not happy. That's the essence I should think, of the story: he's all facade, created to impress Daisy, an illusion, dazzling but not deceiving. I think even Baz Luhrman gets that across, though some think he doesn't and falls for his own illusions.

[tabuno]

Well said.

[Chris Knipp]

Baz Luhrmann: THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)


LEONARDO DICAPRIO AS JAY GATSBY

Luhrmann and DiCaprio's "Gatsby" may be all wrong in some ways, but it still works

The first thing to say is that I went to this movie expecting to hate it, but watched quite involved and went away moved. The two hours-plus went by smoothly. This version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous short novel, as it has been adapted by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, moves along at a brisk pace, it draws you in, and even the somewhat unnecessary framing device of the alcoholic Nick Carroway (Tobey McGuire) writing the whole story in a sanatorium works. You need to know that while Luhrmann's effort, one of at least five screen or TV versions, is still dismissed by the critics as showing the book just can't really be adapted, many have acknowledged that this is the best job yet. There are several reasons for that, besides the effective storytelling: strong emotions, vivid scenes, and a passionate intensity that, even when it's misguided, still sweeps you away. And there's Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, as vivid, glamorous, and touching a figure as you could imagine, even if he's not quite right. He grabs you from his first shot, wrinkling his brow like Orson Welles at his oiliest and most charming, smiling a come-on smile and delivering a 100-carat flash of his eyes, with lovely wavy blond hair and a glossy tan Welles never had. DiCaprio as Gatsby is a sight you just don't want to miss. It may not be as juicy an acting role as the silver tongued monster he played in Django, but it's iconic.

As a literary interpretation this isn't right, because it's all too present, and it's the essence of the book that Gatsby is remote and mysterious. Luhrmann inevitably overdoes the physicality. He even made the movie in 3D, God knows why, so all the excessive furniture and sparklers and waterfalls and pirouetting butlers and jostling crowds and flapper dancers on platforms of the party scenes are even more in-your-face. Besides, DiCaprio's excellent Gatsby is too touching and vulnerable, too authentic a person. The important thing about Gatsby is that he is a gangster, if one with a lovely facade. As done here this story might remind film buffs of Citizen Kane -- in this version Gatsby's mansion is a big turreted castle, like Hearst's San Simeon.

Luhrmann seems aptly named if you think of the luridness of much of his work, the whirly-swirly Strictly Ballroom, the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge!, the flat-out crazy Romeo + Juliet -- when he and DiCaprio first got together. That was the wild, wiry, young DiCaprio who loved to shock. He's obviously bigger and solider now and also very toned down, sometimes capable of pomposity, as in J. Edgar. But he draws on more of the mix of glamor and lunacy of his Howard Hughes here. As for Luhrmann, he toned himself down more recently too, for his unappreciated epic Australia.

Luhrmann's Gatsby is tacky and overblown, and it almost self-destructs in the early scenes, the absurdly intense chock-full parties at Gatsby's mansion that are so hyperactive and excessive you really can't even see anything: they just become noise, compounded by the odd, wistfully adventurous mixture of Twenties tunes and hip-hop, as if the director thought he was doing something as revolutionary as his Rome + Juliet, which you could forgive up to a point because of its sheer kookiness. He is really not playing so free with Fitzgerald as he was with Shakespeare and if he thinks he is he should think again. After the opening party sequences, though the giant Twenties cars racing around with Gatsby or Buchanan at the wheel are over-the-top, and the way many scenes are shot the people look pasted onto a background, caused by the 3D I suppose, there really are a lot of scenes of dialogue, and we may spend more time looking at DiCaprio's suits than at the excessive sets. Naturally, in the scene where Gatsby shows off a stack of custom made shirts to Nick, Luhrmann has him throw piles of clothes pell-mell down from a balcony onto a huge bed. But it's still the same scene.



Maybe the only really memorable set is the industrial Queens roadside "valley of ashes" landscape with the big looming, haunting blue eyeglasses billboard and the gas station where Buchanan's mistress resides. As Daisy's rich, well-born husband Tom Buchanan, Joel Edgerton is extremely repulsive at first with his horrible moustache, but that's okay, except that he doesn't seem aristocratic at all (as Bruce Dern did in the Redford version). But he's a very strong actor, and we forget the mistakes in his important scenes. That's what you can say about most of Luhrmann's Great Gatsby. There are things wrong with a lot of the scenes and some of the casting, but it still all works, not enough to make a great movie but enough to make a compelling one. I'm not sure why this has gotten such a raw deal from the critics, but I guess I do. David Denby's New Yorker review makes it clear: Fitzgerald's novel is an American classic, and he thinks this is tasteless and crude. But after watching the movie I must side more with A.O. Scott of the NY Times, who said the novel is a little overrated, and the movie is a success. The truth, as so often, is somewhere in between. But if you've waded through some of the limp, disappointing screen adaptations of Gatsby like the 1974 Robert Redford one, you owe yourself the opportunity to watch one with some juice.

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, 142 mins., had an early debut in NYC 1 May 2013. It also was the opening night film at Cannes 15 May out of competition, but opened wide in the US 10 May, the UK 16 May.

[tabuno]

I missed Australia, but the trailers really had that lush foreign period feel. "Unappreciated epic of Australia" I gather means it was a very good movie.

I'm surprised that Chris doesn't get paid for his movie reviews. This one is like reading a tasty course from a 4-Star hotel, it flows smoothly down the eye sockets and hits the pleasure centers of one's brain just like eating a succulent, juicy, melt in your mouth steak.

[Chris Knipp]

I reviewed AUSTRALIA. It's very watchable and less attention-getting than Luhrmann's "red curtain trilogy." Thanks for your favorable comment. I probably should put in a little more about the actual plot of GATSBY, though I guess that helps make up for my usual tendency to give away plots, and also a lot of people have read the book. DiCaprio at Cannes just said he read it as a teenager, though he didn't fully understand it, and that's true too -- a kid cant really fully get it. Maybe the deeper secrets, the melancholy and longing, as well as the possibility of having a deep affection for somebody you know isn't morally clean, don't fully come through in this movie - but that doesn't keep it from being involving.

Oscar thinks UPSTREAM COLOR (which hardly anybody has seen so it hardly matters I guess) is hugely overrated; it looks like THE GREAT GATSBY if not hugely is pretty underrated. I will have to read some of the other reviews (besides those two I mentioned) to see if there's any other reason than awe about the classic book so often assigned in schools and Luhrmann's off-puttingly garish style.

[Chris Knipp]

Yesterday it emerged that James Franco wrote a review of Baz Luhrmann's THE GREAT GATSBY for VICE. He calls it "'Gatsby' - a few impressions." That's the kind of title you can use when you've only published one review in your life. There's nothing particularly brilliant about it but his conclusion is similar to mine:

In the end, Luhrmann made it work, and that’s all that matters. The movie held together. We watched the story, we felt things, we were transported and we were engaged.

The Allociné French press rating of the film, which they call GATSBY LE MAGNIFIQUE, has gone down from 3.7 to a mediocre 3.0.

[oscar jubis]

UNDERrated. Indeed.

[Chris Knipp]

Maybe so, if the novel is OVERrated.


The Allociné press rating has gone down to 2.8!

[oscar jubis]

The actors are great, especially the men, particularly Leo. He would have been great even during the golden age. You did right by him in your review.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't like the other men equally well by any means, but I've always liked Leo and he doesn't disappoint here, blossoming into a full-fledged faux tycoon one would never have imagined from the reedy boy of TOTAL ECLIPSE or CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. But this is one of the great American movie talents of our day. I hope he just doesn't harden into stiff biopic schticks as he was beginning to do in the lugubrious J. EDGAR.