The Great Gatsby (film)

The Great Gatsby, dir. Baz Luhrmann (May 2013), 143 mins. 

Bottom Line

Easily one of the most anticipated films of the summer, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is fairly evenly matched in terms of its successes and failures, leaving many audience members to regard it as a faithful adaptation yet a so-so film.

In my film as literature class, students break the analysis into three parts, so I’m going to practice what I teach and use the same categories below.

Narrative Elements

As far as book to film adaptations go, this is a very faithful one. In fact, I might argue that Luhrmann almost went too far in trying to make sure audiences knew he knew he was working with Fitzgerald’s material, leading to some questionable cinematic choices (see below). The one area where the film diverged significantly in terms of plot was the addition of a narrative frame depicting Nick in a sanatorium, where he is attempting to recover from his ordeal out East by writing about it. Despite forming a historically accurate link with Fitzgerald’s biography (his wife Zelda was in and out of institutions), I found this device little more than a hokey attempt to install Carraway as the narrator and justify his repeated narratorial interpolations. My questions here are: 1) how much justification does this really need, and 2) could there not have been a more elegant, less intrusive or obviously contrived way to go about it? (Morgan Freeman's Scrap in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby comes to mind as one of the best utilizations of the type of narration Luhrmann was shooting for.) 

Luhrmann is (perhaps?) a victim of coincidence here in that I could not watch Tobey Maguire at the typewriter without thinking of Ewan McGregor’s forlorn Christian in Moulin Rouge!, which used the same retrospective narration of a tragic death—in essence the same exact framing device. Also, the frame sequences recounting the conversations between Nick Carraway and his psychologist gave way too much information about how the audience was to view the characters in the story proper. The Gatsby mystique that persists through much of the novel is non-existent in the film because Nick instructs in the first few minutes that Gatsby is to be seen, specifically, as a figure of hope. Several times throughout the film, it seemed that information was given at the wrong time, making it that audiences were spoon-fed a “correct” understanding of the characters rather than being allowed to make their own decisions.

Cinematic Elements

The film’s direction has been an area of dissatisfaction with a number of people I’ve spoken to. Luhrmann has taken on high stakes literary adaptations before, but the stakes have risen even higher since and because of Romeo + Juliet. What I’ve gathered is that people have the expectation that Luhrmann’s films will show they something unexpected, essentially that he will take them places they didn’t even know they wanted to go. The problem is that Luhrmann has developed a highly specific and highly recognizable aesthetic, so when he employs that aesthetic a number of times, audiences get the feeling they’re seeing something that’s been “done.” I’m not saying this is fair, but I have to confess that at several points during Gatsby, I found myself being taken back to Moulin Rouge! via certain cinematic techniques. For example, the slow motion descent of Myrtle Wilson post-car-collision mirrors closely Satine’s fall from her aerial bar near the beginning of Moulin Rouge! The transition from extreme long shot to medium shot of a specific area via super-fast zoom is another device seen in both films (to clarify, this would be as if the Buchanans’ home were seen from across the bay, then the camera zoomed quickly to the butler at the front door, or if a shot of the Paris skyline zoomed to Satine inside her elephant). 

Now again, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with or inartistic about Luhrmann employing the same techniques across films. What I am saying, however, is that a slow motion fall or a super-fast zoom is the kind of dramatic editing technique that audiences are likely to remember. No one will ever complain about the frequency with which Spielberg uses eye-line matching because nobody even notices an eye-line match. Unfortunately, the audacity and innovation that first wooed Luhrmann fans might be the same that had them hoping for more from Gatsby. That said, the transposition of text onto the image at certain points in the film in order to remind audiences of the film’s textual beginnings is a choice I simply cannot get behind. Film adaptations shouldn’t bowdlerize source material, but neither should they try to become them. People interested in the text will read it, or—more likely—they already have.

Elements of the Misc-en-Scene

Actors/Acting: In my opinion, this was a well-put-together cast. Though I had some doubts when the castings were first announced, all the major players gave solid performances. In particular, I thought Carey Mulligan gave about as sympathetic a portrayal of Daisy Buchanan as possible. Given the fact that Daisy on the page is shallow and unsubstantial, Mulligan did a surprisingly good job of imbuing her with relatable human emotions and motivations. Leo DiCaprio’s Gatsby found the right mixture of cool detachment and irrational passion, Maguire embodied the Midwest with prudence but not prudishness, and Joel Edgerton, besides having the perfect voice and stature, appropriately captured Tom Buchanan’s banal greed and self-importance. Elizabeth Debicki was fine as Jordan Baker, though the screenwriters’ decision to reduce Jordan to a plot accessory in the film left Debicki without much meat to her character. [Recall that in the book Jordan’s comings and goings underscore the tension between Nick’s observation that she is “incurably dishonest” and Gatsby’s assertion that Miss Baker is “a great sportswoman” and therefore “wouldn’t do anything that isn’t all right,” a tension that dually confirms the dissolution of New York’s elite and Gatsby’s naïve denial of it.]

Cinematography/Costuming: Beautiful, lush, vibrant, decadent--what Baz does best. The shot of Gatsby with his soaking wet suit, red face, and blue eyes framed in Nick’s doorway was one of the best of the film.

Sound/Music: A lot was made of the soundtrack. For me personally, it was what it was, neither enhancing nor detracting from my experience of the film.

To conclude, I think Luhrmann took on a project perhaps more difficult than he even realized. Over the last century, The Great Gatsby has developed a symbolic meaning with almost as much force as (if not more than) its literal one. I can’t think of a harder task than trying to make a film about a man who is also the American Everyman trying and failing to restore a relationship with a woman who is also the Worthlessness and Unattainability of the American Dream. The bottom line is that the film isn’t the book, and no, it’s not even equally good in its own medium. But the book, to me (and I re-read it after seeing the film), is about disgust and decay, about a world that will only ever crudely approximate the one we’re looking for. The film doesn’t approach the profundity of the novel in this way, but it does, in my opinion, do a better job of illustrating the silly, frustrating, and often unwise longings of the human heart. Maybe there's room enough for both perspectives.