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.
