THE GREAT GATSBY

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Grade: C

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton

Premise: An ambitious young man ends up in the inner circle of his phenomenally and mysteriously wealthy neighbor, only to learn the man has designs on his gorgeous married cousin.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some violent and disturbing images

I’ve never read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, an older novel that’s generally on the classics’ shelves at bookstores, but after seeing the newest movie version (directed by visual maestro Baz Luhrmann), I can tell it’s like most other books that reside on those classics’ shelves. It’s got some larger than life characters, it’s full to bursting with impenetrable, highly-sophisticated dialogue, at its center is a fiery, life-changing passion, and it’s largely about love and loss. I haven’t read it, but after seeing the movie, I am, at least, interested in looking up the plot of the novel, just to see how close it seems to the movie’s plot. But that’s about all I’m interested in regarding this movie.

Luhrmann’s epic recreation of Gatsby is rather like the trailer that preceded its arrival into theaters—long and loud, striking in its own busy, colorful, intense way, and yet you’d rather it just be over. Like Luhrmann’s best-known films (1996’s modern retelling of Romeo & Juliet, 2001’s Moulin Rouge, and 2008’s Australia) it’s packed with stunning visuals and an aesthetic language that’s meant to be awe-inspiring. Notice: that's meant to be awe-inspiring.

This spastic, slow, melodramatic story begins and ends with a weary young man (Tobey Maguire) recounting the adventures he had in New York in the summer of 1922, which largely concerned his encounters with a remarkably rich, uncannily successful and famous figure, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Maguire’s Nick Carraway is a nobody in New York, just another guy trying to strike it rich selling bonds, occasionally enjoying visits with his pretty, sweet-natured cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), who’s married to a pompous old college buddy of Nick’s, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). One day, however, Nick—who lives in a modest cottage that’s all but invisible in a neighborhood of towering mansions—gets an invitation to a lavish party held by his next-door neighbor, the owner of the largest mansion in the neighborhood, Gatsby. The party is huge—an explosion of music and alcohol and dancing girls in skimpy outfits and societal bigwigs acting fools—and it’s there that Nick hears all about Gatsby. Some say he’s a spy. Some say he’s related to the defeated Kaiser. Some say he’s a mobster.

Whatever he is, Gatsby seeks out Nick fairly soon with an unusual request—he’d like to have tea with Nick and Daisy. It’s then that Nick learns that Daisy—who’s trapped in a loveless marriage to the boring, philandering Tom—and Gatsby were deeply in love and on the verge of marriage before the latter went off to fight in the Great War. Brushing carelessly aside the fact that Daisy’s married, Gatsby sees her as the final piece to his perfect life, a life he imagined while growing up penniless in the mid-West. He means to marry her and shower her with riches forever. Nick slowly comes to realize that Gatsby is not content with just seeing Daisy again or even having an affair—he wants her, and he’s so used to getting whatever he wants via his immense wealth and popularity, he’s not even considering that anything might get in the way. Nonetheless, Daisy’s long absences at home arouse the suspicion of her husband, who launches an investigation to find out who Gatsby really is.

The trailer made the central premise pretty clear—ordinary guy meets crazy rich, mysterious guy, who loves a girl—and it’s interesting enough, but this Gatsby starts going downhill fast. You know a movie’s in love with itself when a fairly meaningless sequence in which Nick and his buddy Tom party turns into a five-minute montage of people drinking, dancing, kissing, and squealing with laughter. Oh, and be sure to add in clips of a trumpet player on the street—entirely unrelated to the main action—playing his shiny trumpet at mind-shattering volume, undoubtedly just for atmospheric purposes. Nick’s visit to one of Gatsby’s lavish parties is the same way—a long, interminable sequence of deafening music, fast-cut editing and almost blindingly-busy visuals. As with Luhrmann’s other films, nothing is subtle, nothing is gentle. Everything is beaten into the ground.

Oh, and the dialogue is atrocious. I’m sure a lot of it is lifted straight from Fitzgerald’s gracefully-aging text, but the actors sound ridiculous saying some of the things they do, which often seem unrelated and rarely flow in the same scene. Mulligan’s Daisy, in particular, hardly ever seemed to say anything that a) a normal person would say, and b) was at all relevant to the current circumstances in the movie. This robs Gatsby of real suspense or interest, this feeling—one I’ve experienced in movies before, and it’s never a good one—that the movie, two and a half hours long as it is, feels like a trailer for a longer, more complete film.

I’ll take a pass on that one, though. DiCaprio, playing an eccentric role that reminded me a lot of his turn as the impressive but crazy-OCD Howard Hughes in 2004’s The Aviator, teeters from intriguing to annoying—Gatsby quickly goes from someone of interest to a twittering man-child. Maguire has the part-blessing/part-curse role of playing the straight man—in a movie like this, he’s by far the least-interesting/memorable character, all but a talking prop. It’s Edgerton as the pompous but fiercely-proud Tom who makes up the film’s best moments, mainly because he’s the only person who doesn’t worship at the altar of Jay Gatsby, who doesn’t grow on you as the movie’s running time passes (I might slam my head in a door if I hear anyone call anyone else “old sport” ever again).

As with his memorable Romeo & Juliet re-tread (one of DiCaprio’s first popular roles), Luhrmann overdoes it to the extreme, making this movie all about the pomp and spectacle. It may allow him to breathe easier as an artist extraordinaire, but it doesn’t help the movie, or the audience, breathe. It’s suffocating, heavy, and slow.

Bottom Line: I’ve never read the book, but Baz Luhrmann’s visually stupefying but surprisingly dull monolith doesn’t exactly make me want to run to a bookstore and grab it—unless maybe I wanted to see if this movie at all resembled its source text. Not saying other people couldn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Written for the Screen by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce; Based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rated PG-13

Length: 143 minutes