Musings on Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (BIG SPOILERS FOR THE NOVEL AND THUS THE MOVIE)
I think for the most part the film is faithful to the contents and the themes of the book. It picks on a few of them and magnifies them, though, so I can understand fans of the book being put off a bit. Luhrmann seems to see the story as a love story and I’m not sure it should be, really. The film was a bit too long for me, and started to drag eventually; I read someone saying that the pace slows down once Gatsby and Daisy have sparked up their affair and I think that might be fair comment.
I’m not sure Tobey Maguire works well at all as Nick Carraway. Luhrmann has him narrating but he does so without the requisite flair. I mean the language used is great, but he either undersells it or oversells it depending on the scene. I warmed to his acting eventually but for the first half an hour or so I thought he was a disaster. I was pretty sure the Spider-Man films had ruined Maguire for me - or the Spider-Man films had ruined him - and by the end of the film I hadn't rejected that notion entirely.
They add a framing device which was fine for me but made Liz’s hair stand on end a bit.
Aside from the focus more on the love story aspect, the main point the film drags from the novel and does to... well, excess, is the Excess. The party scenes and the music and the booze is all done quite wonderfully.
The film reminded me a lot in a way of Sin City. That’s a strange thing to say, but in the same way Rodriguez’s Sin City tried to look so much like the comic on which it was based that it sort of attained this heightened level of fake that made it hyper-real, Gatsby has the same thing. Most of the time the settings in which the characters are placed are clearly over the top and mostly CGed, but it’s on purpose and you roll with it. Everything is turned up to 11.
A choice Luhrmann made which has been focused on a lot in reviews and the press is the anachronistic soundtrack. On a smaller level Rhapsody in Blue is used for one key scene, despite not coming out until a few years after the time when the book and film are set, but more prominently, the soundtrack uses modern music, including jazzified covers of Crazy in Love and Back to Black, but also rap, as Jay-Z was the producer on the soundtrack.
All this works really, REALLY well, honestly. I really enjoyed the soundtrack, it doesn’t seem out of place (though it is over the top, of course, like everything else). Rap actually works perfectly. It’s African-American in origin, as was the jazz used in the novel that was controversial and “dangerous” at the time but nowadays would not be.
A major theme in rap, certainly that of Jay-Z, of course focuses on braggadocio, aspiration, opulence, focus on material things: all things very in fitting with the time in which the novel is set and some of themes upon which it focuses - that fixation on class and attempting to rise above the station (hopelessly or not) to which you were born.
It’s over-literal, which I didn’t like. It rightly reveres the dialogue from the novel, but to a degree which is too blatant. Several times prominent passages literally appear on screen word by word as if typed by a huge typewriter or scrawled by the hand of God. But maybe as a result loads more people will read the novel. That’s got to be positive.
DiCaprio is perfect as Gatsby. Brilliant. All three of the main characters I felt were depicted well. I feel like I understood their characters properly, despite Maguire’s acting and narration.
I haven’t read the novel but Liz adores it. She felt the introduction of Gatsby was done really well, as was the scene where he finally sees Daisy again, and the scene towards the end when Tom Buchanan pokes enough to reveal Gatsby’s true character underneath. But she thought that the shocking scene earlier on when you see just how nasty Tom is (when he breaks Myrtle’s nose) was underplayed and not significant enough. And it was literally underplayed as they change it to him slapping her (which is nasty of course, anyway).
An interesting choice is that for Gatsby’s associate, a man of dirty dealings, Jewish in the novel, retains his name in the film but is played by an Indian actor. In fact probably the most famous Indian actor (certainly to Indians and Bollywood fans), Amitabh Bachchan. But it works really well.
OVERALL, then, my view is that if you accept that Gatsby is a great novel, and you think it would be good if more people read it, and in particular that it should be read by younger generations, you have to accept that a movie like this is a good way to go about it. It was entertaining enough, it was probably aimed for people even younger than me, but I really rather enjoyed it, far more than I thought I would going in.
I’m not sure Tobey Maguire works well at all as Nick Carraway. Luhrmann has him narrating but he does so without the requisite flair. I mean the language used is great, but he either undersells it or oversells it depending on the scene. I warmed to his acting eventually but for the first half an hour or so I thought he was a disaster. I was pretty sure the Spider-Man films had ruined Maguire for me - or the Spider-Man films had ruined him - and by the end of the film I hadn't rejected that notion entirely.
They add a framing device which was fine for me but made Liz’s hair stand on end a bit.
Aside from the focus more on the love story aspect, the main point the film drags from the novel and does to... well, excess, is the Excess. The party scenes and the music and the booze is all done quite wonderfully.
The film reminded me a lot in a way of Sin City. That’s a strange thing to say, but in the same way Rodriguez’s Sin City tried to look so much like the comic on which it was based that it sort of attained this heightened level of fake that made it hyper-real, Gatsby has the same thing. Most of the time the settings in which the characters are placed are clearly over the top and mostly CGed, but it’s on purpose and you roll with it. Everything is turned up to 11.
A choice Luhrmann made which has been focused on a lot in reviews and the press is the anachronistic soundtrack. On a smaller level Rhapsody in Blue is used for one key scene, despite not coming out until a few years after the time when the book and film are set, but more prominently, the soundtrack uses modern music, including jazzified covers of Crazy in Love and Back to Black, but also rap, as Jay-Z was the producer on the soundtrack.
All this works really, REALLY well, honestly. I really enjoyed the soundtrack, it doesn’t seem out of place (though it is over the top, of course, like everything else). Rap actually works perfectly. It’s African-American in origin, as was the jazz used in the novel that was controversial and “dangerous” at the time but nowadays would not be.
A major theme in rap, certainly that of Jay-Z, of course focuses on braggadocio, aspiration, opulence, focus on material things: all things very in fitting with the time in which the novel is set and some of themes upon which it focuses - that fixation on class and attempting to rise above the station (hopelessly or not) to which you were born.
It’s over-literal, which I didn’t like. It rightly reveres the dialogue from the novel, but to a degree which is too blatant. Several times prominent passages literally appear on screen word by word as if typed by a huge typewriter or scrawled by the hand of God. But maybe as a result loads more people will read the novel. That’s got to be positive.
DiCaprio is perfect as Gatsby. Brilliant. All three of the main characters I felt were depicted well. I feel like I understood their characters properly, despite Maguire’s acting and narration.
I haven’t read the novel but Liz adores it. She felt the introduction of Gatsby was done really well, as was the scene where he finally sees Daisy again, and the scene towards the end when Tom Buchanan pokes enough to reveal Gatsby’s true character underneath. But she thought that the shocking scene earlier on when you see just how nasty Tom is (when he breaks Myrtle’s nose) was underplayed and not significant enough. And it was literally underplayed as they change it to him slapping her (which is nasty of course, anyway).
An interesting choice is that for Gatsby’s associate, a man of dirty dealings, Jewish in the novel, retains his name in the film but is played by an Indian actor. In fact probably the most famous Indian actor (certainly to Indians and Bollywood fans), Amitabh Bachchan. But it works really well.
OVERALL, then, my view is that if you accept that Gatsby is a great novel, and you think it would be good if more people read it, and in particular that it should be read by younger generations, you have to accept that a movie like this is a good way to go about it. It was entertaining enough, it was probably aimed for people even younger than me, but I really rather enjoyed it, far more than I thought I would going in.