A short review of ‘The Great Gatsby’ (2013)

by Adam Hannah

The 1974 film version of the Great Gatsby is a reasonably lifeless film. It is reasonably well acted and largely inoffensive, but, for the most part, fails to reflect Fitzgeralds stunning prose and explorations of  aspiration, decadence and American social politics. It misses the point, but it looks quite nice.

Baz Luhrmann’s  version, on the other hand, seems immensely self satisfied. It understands the novel – so well in fact that every metaphor or subtle piece of foretelling  is splayed across the screen in a such a palette of colour to be almost grotesque. There are no hints in this film, nothing to be reflected upon. Nothing is left out, every inch of the book is on the screen, all at once.

Despite the frankly weird, and pointless, narrative device of Nick narrating and, indeed, writing the story from rehab (a clear nod to Fitzgerald’s own history), the film is more like Gatsby’s mansion – a fake. In the novel, the ‘owl-eyed man’ calls Gatsby ‘a regular Belasco’. David Belasco was a theatre director, known for his elaborate sets and extensive use of props. The film appears to take this as a set of instructions – the heart of the film is visual trickery, ceaseless and turned up to 11. The reason that the most elegant passages of the novel stand out is that so much of the rest is pared back. Luhrmann is clearly incapable of such subtlety.

Other thoughts:

• The acting are mostly average, but it’s hard to blame anyone for that. Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton are decent. I thought Di Caprio was pretty awful.
• The modern soundtrack could have been good, but was pretty gimmicky.
• Luhrmann is a talentless hack with a very talented wife.
• Honestly, the seventeenth wide shot of the CGI’d New York was enough.
• This movie sucked in pretty much every conceivable way.