Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
 
Finally, a Gatsby that gets it.  Film adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s venerable novel have a history of falling embarrassingly wide of the mark.  I’ve seen three before Baz Luhrman’s recent version: an undistinguished 1949 release with Alan Ladd badly miscast as Gatsby, the infamous 1974 flop with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (both miscast, Farrow very badly), and a rather good TV version from 2000 with Mia Sorvino quite engaging as Daisy but Toby Stephens so reserved as Gatsby that, like the shy millionaire avoiding one of his own parties, he hardly makes his presence known. 
 
It’s crucial that Gatsby be cast well because character is paramount to the story—it’s the combustible interaction of personalities that drives the book, not a rip-roaring plot.  The story is simple, the people complex--and elusive, given that they are presented to us through the haunted memory of narrator Nick Carraway, whose brief friendship with Gatsby forms the heart of Fitzgerald’s tragic story.  It’s his version of events and people that we are supposed to see, not easily captured in a third-person medium like film.  In the novel, Nick’s finely contoured portraits of his friends are woven into a blistering satire of New York society at the height of the Roaring ‘20s, the infamous decade of reckless economic growth and even more reckless personal behavior.  Doing justice to Fitzgerald’s complex and unique vision is a challenge only someone of Gatsby-size optimism should take on.
 
Baz Luhrman (who co-wrote the script with Craig Pearce) doesn’t hesitate to dream big with his film projects.  The director of Moulin Rouge and Australia loves expressing himself through size and spectacle, and Gatsby gives him plenty of opportunities for both.  The novel lends itself easily to epic treatment because its legendary era is filled with gangsters, millionaires, flappers, and orgiastic parties, all driven by a spendthrift economy that ends in a spectacular Crash, the influence of which is still being felt today.  Hollywood has expended a lot of energy over the years--inventing whole genres even—to glamorize the easy wealth, bootleg booze, and no-holds-barred sex of the Roaring ‘20s.  A world spinning drunkenly out of control is strangely compelling, and temptingly photogenic.
 
Reportedly based on an earlier, darker draft of the novel than the one published in 1922, the film follows the coming-of-age story of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young man from the Midwest trying to make his fortune as a bonds salesman in New York City.  Experiencing independence for the first time, Nick is captivated by the energy and excitement he sees all around him, particularly at the neighboring mansion of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who throws lavish parties that everyone comes to but whom no one seems to know.  When they finally meet, Nick is fascinated by Gatsby’s earnest but seemingly innocent nature and quickly becomes his confidante and friend.  Gatsby longs to meet Nick’s cousin, the beautiful and capricious Daisy (Carey Mulligan), wife of polo-playing aristocrat Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).  The tea that Nick arranges to bring them together turns into a tryst of sorts, for Gatsby and Daisy already know each other.  They met and fell in love years before during the war but were separated when Gatsby was shipped overseas.  Afterwards, Daisy married Tom, a society match, and the memory of Gatsby faded.  But Gatsby never forgot Daisy, and he plans now to rekindle their romance and win her back, fulfilling a dream that has sustained him through the intervening years.  Unhappily married to a philandering, hard-drinking husband, Daisy succumbs to his persistence and his charm and seems for a time to share his dream.  
 
It is short-lived.  Tom learns of the affair and digs into Gatsby’s past, uncovering the unsavory facts behind his fabulous wealth.  Gatsby’s business partners are known gamblers and bootleggers, and possibly stock swindlers.  His money is dirty, his gilded image a lie, a front for the criminal activity that underscores the money-making madness of the age.  A party in a New York hotel room turns ugly when Tom confronts Gatsby in front of Daisy, and Gatsby reacts violently.  As he and a shaken Daisy drive home, they are involved in a hit-and-run accident that kills Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher ), the wife of a roadside gas station owner (Jason Clarke).  Unknown to them both, the woman is Tom’s mistress, and when he learns whose car killed his lover, he tells the grief-stricken husband Gatsby’s name.  Betrayal and tragedy follow in a seemingly inexorable course of events, leaving Nick emotionally broken and disillusioned with his friends and the world around him.  He winds up in a sanatorium, recovering from alcoholism and depression, trying to piece both his story and his life back together, searching for a meaning that will give him the resolve to go on.
 
Despite his affinity for spectacle, Luhrman’s is the first film version of the novel to successfully engage the intimate dimension of its story-- the changeable inner lives of the characters and the intricate dynamics of their relationships.  It’s also the first to capture the book’s lyricism, the poetry of Fitzgerald’s language.  Gatsby is a very writerly novel, self-consciously eloquent in its analysis of events and characters and its meditation on the contradictions of the American experience.   Nick’s by turns rhapsodic and sardonic portrait of the world of wealth and class privilege in the America of the 1920s is a requiem to human folly and shattered ideals.  Fitzgerald’s highly colored prose sings and stings by turns, and Luhrman’s film, alternately extroverted and introspective, deftly translates both qualities into cinematic form.
 
The sanatorium is an invention—it does not appear in the published version of the book—but an inspired one.   Nick’s doctor suggests that Nick purge his inner demons by writing about them.  The narration of the film becomes the writing of the novel and Fitzgerald’s authorship is recast as Nick’s in seamless self-referentiality.  The implications are far-reaching.  What begins as a conventional framing device--the flashback structure--changes into something subtler, more evanescent: the act of impressing memory on film.  All that is “unfilmable”—memory, consciousness, writing--is woven into the visual fabric of the movie.  As images dissolve into one another, and Nick’s voice-over quietly pronounces some of Fitzgerald’s most celebrated sentences, fragments of them flash across the screen in handwritten form, as if appearing just as the author thinks and records them.  In those moments of literary unfolding, image and sound combine to create a complex and fluid subjectivity:  screen, page, and the author’s mind meld together, illuminated by the same ephemeral light.
 
In this inventive way, Luhrman’s film puts the book on display and within the spectator’s grasp without sacrificing its cinematic essence.  The “interiority” is wrapped in a dazzling exterior, a fantasmagoric background of near-Expressionistic set and costume design.  Luhrman is in full Moulin Rouge mode during the gaudy party scenes, highly choreographed set pieces that pour on the glam and pulse to the beat of rapper Jay Z’s modern take on the exuberance and abandon of 20s-style ragtime and jazz.  Contemporizing the music is one of Gatsby’s riskiest and most controversial choices, but it makes a fascinating kind of sense.  Rap shares outlaw status with the jazz of the 1920s, the aggressive infusion of black culture into white society.  The two cultures both revel in hedonistic lifestyles devoted to displaying the material trappings of success, the conspicuous consumption that makes bling-crazy “cribs” contemporaneous in spirit to Gatsby’s glittering mansion.  No mere reproduction, however imaginative, of crowds of jazz babies wildly dancing the Charleston would have the same impact or convey the brash and rebellious style of an anarchic party scene the way Luhrman’s anachronistic musical numbers do.  It would more than likely appear quaint and amusing instead of shocking to the sensibilities and sense of propriety that Gatsby’s riotous parties were to his guests from the staid world outside.  We are presented with a modern-day equivalent of that shock: convention is defied, expectations violated by the inappropriateness of a rap beat and nouveau Broadway glitz in the context of an era long past.  Ingeniously, the film allows the viewer to live through something of Nick’s experience, feeling the surprise and discomfort of his disorientation in a world whose rules are so different than the ones he’s used to and expected.
 
Gatsby is not, after all, a documentary but a stylized rendering of the past as it appears in a work of fiction.  Luhrman’s use of exaggeration and excess intensifies our experience of the story’s literariness as well as its cinematic-ness.  Crowd-pleasing thrills like 3D aside, Gatsby ensconces the viewer in a visual hyper-reality not just to make the haunts of the rich sumptuous looking but to capture the colorful, at times hallucinatory aspect of the book’s prose.  That prose’s written-ness is given its corollary in the film’s visual overabundance.   Luhrman takes the book’s famous images—the powdery gray landscape of the Valley of Ashes, the weathered billboard with the giant eyes inside a pair of glasses, the green dock light marking the end of Daisy’s property—and renders them as dream-like as Fitzgerald’s descriptions by showing them over and over from varying angles and distances and in different contexts, pushing them past literary symbols into the immediate experience of Fitzgerald’s vision: a world blind to its contradictions and verging on madness.
 
That madness finds its way into Gatsby’s driven and misguided character, and no film version before this one has seriously looked at the disordered soul inside his perfectly groomed and tailored figure.  Ladd and Redford were stoic, stalwart men of the world, too sane in manner to hint at either the naïve idealism or the emotional instability behind Gatsby’s impossible dream.  Thankfully, Luhrman and Di Caprio choose differently and give us—at long last--a complicated Gatsby.  A career of playing troubled youths and powerful but insecure men such as Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover provides DiCaprio with an extraordinary resume for the part.  He perfectly embodies both sides of Gatsby’s charisma--the easy charm and GQ-style cool, and the aching vulnerability behind their protective wall.  More important, he makes the erosion of Gatsby’s confidence and composure more than just a lover’s disappointed hopes, but a slow-motion fall from grace.  Gatsby’s film fate is finally depicted as the tragedy Nick has all along been telling us it is.  Beyond his incisive words is the screen evidence of DiCaprio’s impassioned performance, which makes us feel at once both the elation Gatsby feels at the heights he attains and his heart-rending bewilderment and emotional collapse upon discovering their illusory nature.
 
When Nick first encounters his cousin Daisy in the novel, he writes “[she] began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.  It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.  Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”  It would be hard for any actress to live up to that description, but it’s nice to see someone finally try.  Carey Mulligan’s winsome appeal falls a bit short of thrilling, but it does promise much.  Petite and pretty, she deftly provides many of the right grace notes for Daisy—lively and languid by turns, capricious, flirty, fragile--but somehow never captures her character’s most essential quality, her irresistibleness. Why would Gatsby sacrifice everything for her?  She’s an ideal but an ideal with flesh and blood behind it--Daisy has sex appeal, she promises “gay, exciting things.”  Mulligan is dressed for allure but never exudes it—she never asserts herself and takes command of the screen the way Daisy commands the attention of her admirers.  Much of the blame lies with Luhrman, who displays a rare timidity with regard to his film’s heroine.  He lovingly places Mulligan in the frame but never hands it over to her—he keeps her a shade to the side, an eye-catching but still subordinate part of the décor.  (In the scene where she and Gatsby are reunited, where she should absolutely shine, she is visually smothered by the flowers he’s comically overfilled the room with—playing straight man to a gag.)  The result is often lovely, but inconclusive—once again Daisy remains maddeningly out of reach, her promise unfulfilled. 
 
Good support is offered by a number of others, despite some slight casting miscues.   Tobey Maguire gives an earnest performance as Nick, although he’s too callow for the part, especially when contrasted to an overly vampish Elizabeth Debicki as his potential love interest, professional golfer Jordan Baker.   The film wisely downplays the romance Fitzgerald imagined for their two characters in favor of a more plausible friendship.   The biggest surprise of the movie is Joel Edgerton’s canny turn as the loutish Tom.  Brusque, humorless, and speaking in monotone for the first two thirds of the film, Edgerton’s performance dramatically shifts gears once Tom realizes Daisy has fallen for Gatsby.  His fierce and unexpectedly cunning response to this crisis in his home galvanizes the final part of the movie.  The scene in which he and Gatsby have it out in front of Daisy and the others blisters with tension.   No stock jealous husband bellowing his outrage, Edgerton’s Tom boldly takes the moral high ground with a conviction that’s hard to fault.  Gatsby and Daisy are stunned, and the viewer most likely is, too.  Like Tom, who appeared to have ceded his marriage to his rival, Edgerton has been holding back: suddenly the dramatic center of the film, he doesn’t just accept the spotlight, he yanks it away from the film’s better known stars.  
 
It’s an unlooked-for coup, and brilliantly illustrates another facet of the ingenuity which Luhrman and his creative team have adaptrf this book that, despite its 90 years, still feels very modern.   Not content just to dramatize the events of the story, they try to duplicate them in the viewer’s emotional experience.   We have not been prepared for the revelation of Tom’s other side—nothing in Edgerton’s performance has hinted at its existence up to this point.  As a consequence, we are forced to experience, along with Gatsby and the others, the shock of its sudden appearance and its devastating impact: Gatsby’s romantic status is diminished, Daisy’s connection to him strained, and the plot is sent spinning in another direction entirely.  For the audience, the surprise is compounded by a violent redirection of their identification from Gatsby to the heretofore unsympathetic Tom.  These twin disorientations, narrative and psychological, reflect and reinforce each other in powerful fashion.  We can’t help but feel Gatsby’s dismay--momentarily it’s ours, too.
 
That sense of dismay lies at the heart of why Gatsby still matters—dreams falling short of their promise remains a profoundly human tragedy, universally meaningful to us.  In both personal and cultural terms,  Gatsby presents the inversion of an archetype, a reverse fairy tale, an anti-myth: the hero fails not only to complete his quest but even to understand what it is to begin with.  From the outset, its object is an illusion, a fiction--his imagined heroine was never in need of rescue, his goal always unattainable because it was never necessary. 
 
Gatsby also marks a particular moment in the souring of the American Dream, a theme always timely to a people whose history depends on the continued belief in the promise of that Dream, despite innumerable disappointments and betrayals.  Ironically, the moment of disenchantment Gatsby depicts is overshadowed by the mythology of its historical era, an era so romanticized for its excitement and energy and brazen expression of individualism that its most lawless figures are among its most celebrated.  Gatsby both capitalized on and helped perpetuate this mythology, and much of the book’s continuing fascination for us has to do with the popular culture that developed around it--and which has now produced another telling of its story. 
 
The Great Gatsby is, ultimately, a quintessentially American story, and it keeps coming back to us because the stories that belong to us as a nation and a people always do.  Perhaps the next time the story will end the way we want it to, its promise fully realized at last.  Luhrman’s achievement renews one’s hope in that possibility.  Yes, his Gatsby is all right at the end.  Thank goodness the project was given the green light.
 
 
 

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