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The Grating 'Gatsby'

Watch a clip from the film "The Great Gatsby." Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, a Midwestern war veteran (Tobey Maguire) finds himself drawn to the past and lifestyle of his millionaire neighbor (Leonardo DiCaprio). (Photo/Video: Warner Bros)

Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.

The production is not insipid, let's give it that. An exercise in absurdist excess, this fourth screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, means to dramatize the excesses of the Jazz Age, with hints of Weimar decadence thrown in for bad measure. But that's a banality by this late date, and it's as far as Mr. Luhrmann goes in making sense of the book. The film's only governing principle is maximalism—everything has been made as big as possible, apart from conversational interludes, when big feelings are displayed, like bullet points, by actors striking static poses.

ALL THAT BAZ: Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in 'The Great Gatsby. ENLARGE
ALL THAT BAZ: Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in 'The Great Gatsby. Warner Bros. Pictures

For a while the sheer scale of the thing keeps you engaged, if not agog. (I watched through 3-D glasses that weren't worth the bother.) Gatsby's mansion is a cross between Neuschwanstein Castle and what San Simeon might have been if Hearst had been more gregarious; partygoers swarm like cicadas, and make as much of a racket. A road trip between Long Island and Manhattan takes on the thunderous intensity of a Grand Prix; the mere arrival of Gatsby's gorgeous yellow Duesenberg in Nick Carraway's driveway is enough to set teacups rattling on a kitchen shelf. (Nick, the novel's narrator and aspiring writer, is played by Tobey Maguire.) Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, a desolate strip half way between West Egg and New York City, has become an expressionist Hades where doomed workers slave away on giant slag heaps. (That's as close as the movie comes to the author's complex attitude toward American capitalism.)

The artistic elephantiasis takes many forms. When young James Gatz, who hasn't yet transformed himself into Jay Gatsby, first encounters his benefactor-to-be, Dan Cody, he doesn't just row a borrowed rowboat out to Cody's yacht on Lake Superior, as in the book; Gatz saves Cody and his vessel from incipient calamity during a storm of sufficient ferocity to scuttle the Titanic. And when the camera first catches sight of the fully formed Gatsby, presiding like a god over one of his parties, fireworks fill the summer sky behind him and a symphony orchestra summons up the majestic strains of "Rhapsody in Blue."

Related Video

Watch interviews and behind the scenes footage from the filming of "The Great Gatsby," with director Baz Luhrmann and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan. (Photo: Warner Bros)

It's a moment that makes you smile, even if you recall that Woody Allen used Gershwin's anthem, and fireworks, to far greater effect in the preface of "Manhattan." There's something touching—again, for a while—in the filmmaker's desire to please, in his fevered efforts to define a time in American history by the way it looks. (He's so eager to cram in pieces of period detail that one camera pullback reveals high-steel workers constructing a skyscraper, even though it's the middle of the night.) But many of the borrowings—from Busby Berkeley, from "The Crowd," from "Citizen Kane"—begin to ring hollow, especially because Mr. Luhrmann borrows, well beyond the point of self-parody, from the same bag of tricks he opened up more than a decade ago in "Moulin Rouge!"

The problem isn't those tricks per se. When the camera swoops and darts ecstatically, or in this case plummets into Manhattan's stone canyons, the effect can be impressive, never mind that Spider-Man has claimed such aerobatics for his own. One fleeting but striking image is that of an apartment building, with each window expanding or contracting, like a window on the screen of a giant computer, as it frames a half-seen life.

Nor is the music problematic, notwithstanding the film's much-hyped use of hip-hop, or the presence of the rapper Jay-Z as one of the producers. In fact, the hip-hop is used judiciously; it kicks in mainly during party scenes, when there's monstrous pounding from other sources, and it's no more intrusive than all the other efforts to heighten the story's reality. (The screenplay is credited to Mr. Luhrmann and Craig Pearce.Catherine Martin designed the lustrous production and the stunning costumes. Simon Duggan did the cinematography, which seemed of variable quality at the studio screening I attended.)

Revelers in 'The Great Gatsby.' ENLARGE
Revelers in 'The Great Gatsby.' Warner Bros. Pictures

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul. For all of its glittery fragmentation, "Moulin Rouge!" came around to moments of genuine passion. None of these new trappings means a thing because the people who populate them are stylish sticks, unsinged by the spark of life.

That's almost surely not the fault of the actors, for the director turns them into lifelike props. Mr. DiCaprio, who's no more comfortable with the phrase "old sport" than Robert Redford was in the previous version, is elaborately sincere when he isn't frowning like Jack Nicholson; being charming like, well, Leonardo DiCaprio, or being mysterious, except that people who are genuinely mysterious don't look mysterious. Carey Mulligan's Daisy is either languorous or amorous, not a lot in between. Mr. Maguire's Nick is cheerlessly impressionable. Joel Edgerton's Tom is charmlessly brutish. Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker is a flouncing cipher. And Mr. Luhrmann uses Amitabh Bachchan, a legendary star in his native India, to make the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem a leering Fagin.

Given the lifelessness of the enterprise, there's little point in belaboring its failure to convey the novel's themes, let alone the emotional and social resonance of what has come to be considered a masterpiece of world literature. Although the hero created himself out of the whole cloth of romantic yearning, we see almost nothing of that self-creation, only the conflicted result. Although the Nick of the novel arrives at a new and tragic understanding of the American Dream, the Nick on screen can't be more than an earnest observer, since any vestige of the story's tragic sense has been replaced by melodramatic sadness.

This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby" while living on Long Island and in Europe. In a deviation from the book that amounts to a calumny against literary history, Nick, the author's surrogate, is discovered in a psychiatric hospital where, as an aging alcoholic, he struggles to comprehend the vanished figure at the center of the long-ago story, and finally completes his treatment by writing the novel. It's literature as therapy, and Gatsby as Rosebud.

'Something in the Air'

Watch a clip from the film "Something in the Air." In the months after the heady weeks of May '68, a group of young Europeans search for a way to continue the revolution believed to be just beginning. (Photo/Video: Sundance Selects)

As a longtime admirer of Olivier Assayas, I've heaped praise on his previous two films: "Summer Hours," a richly textured drama that examines the emotional content of material possessions, and "Carlos," which isn't a single film, but an epic achievement, starring Edgar Ramírez, in the form of a 5½-hour miniseries about the international terrorist of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Lola Créton and Clement Metayer in 'Something in the Air.' ENLARGE
Lola Créton and Clement Metayer in 'Something in the Air.' Sundance Selects

"Something in the Air" is a fictionalized reminiscence of the writer-director's youthful involvement in radical politics—high-school revolutionaries seized by the drama of their day and graduating from distributing mimeographed pamphlets to throwing Molotov cocktails. Too bad it isn't more engaging—and dramatic—than it is, but this new film, in French with English subtitles, is still worth seeing for what it says of the turbulent state of France in the early 1970s, when Mr. Assayas was a high-school student in Paris, and of the zigzag pursuit—of painting, beautiful girls and independence from a demanding father—that finally culminated in his becoming the filmmaker he was meant to be.


DVD Focus

'Django Unchained' ENLARGE
'Django Unchained'
'Django Unchained' (2012)

Leonardo DiCaprio is deliciously expansive as Calvin Candie, a pretentious fool of a plantation owner, in a Quentin Tarantino film that is wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery's singular horrors. This reminds us of at least two things relevant to "The Great Gatsby"—that Mr. DiCaprio is a fine actor when he's given substantial material, and that stylistic extravagance, far from being the hollow thing it is in Baz Luhrmann's hands, can be an effective adjunct to artistry.

Carey Mulligan in 'An Education' ENLARGE
Carey Mulligan in 'An Education' Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett Collection
'An Education' (2009)

Here's another reminder—that Carey Mulligan, who is so inexpressively decorative as Gatsby's Daisy, has done superb work in recent years, most notably in this tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom. The time is 1961, a year before the outbreak of Beatlemania, in a London that Ms. Mulligan's Jenny, at the age of 16, finds sedate if not downright sedative. Peter Sarsgaard is David, the ostensible sophisticate who awakens her, and seduces her. Lone Scherfig directed from Nick Hornby's screenplay, which took its inspiration, in the fullest sense of the word, from a short memoir by Lynn Barber.

'Irma Vep' ENLARGE
'Irma Vep'
'Irma Vep' (1996)

Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this delightful French-language film about the perils of filmmaking and, not incidentally, vampires. The matchless Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself—a Hong Kong martial-arts star named Maggie who speaks no French. Jean-Pierre Léaud (the star of so many classic New Wave films by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) is René Vidal, a New Wave director who wants to keep from being completely washed up by remaking the silent serial "Les Vampires" with Maggie as his leading lady. Nathalie Richard is Zoë, a wardrobe mistress with a special feeling for Maggie's body.


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