Der große Gatsby

The use of modern music (rap, EDM, etc.) that sounds nothing like the Roaring '20s is jarring. It rips you from the story, and it's hard to get back into it afterward. In some scenes, it's like watching a parody because the mismatch is flat-out laughable. Using era music for an era piece would've added a lot of character to the movie. And this movie, which I otherwise loved, deserved better.

Don't get me wrong; I do like those songs, and I get why the soundtrack was a hit. They just shouldn't have crashed a movie that's set in the 1920s. The distraction they caused did nothing but damage -- lots of it.

There comes a time in a director's career when he or she may face one of the seemingly impossible cinematic feats: to make the movie better than the book.

Director Baz Luhrmann accepted this challenge when he signed on to direct a new theatrical take of "The Great Gatsby." F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is considered an American literary classic, a staple in high school English courses. To tamper with greatness could spell disaster for the film and disappoint fans. With this in mind, Luhrmann took the details that made the novel so successful and generously applied them to his film.

The result? Beautiful visuals, awkward editing and overblown symbolism.

The adaptation is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), who recounts his adventures on Long Island to a doctor while at a sanatorium. Using word-for-word passages from the novel, Carraway describes his move to New York to try his hand in the bond business. There, he reconnects with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and learns his next-door neighbor is none other than Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the secretive millionaire known for his lavish parties and fantastical reputation. Little does Carraway know that Gatsby acts this way in hopes of winning back Daisy's love despite five years of separation and her marriage to another man.

Hoping to live up to its hype, the movie tries to be as fantastic and flawless as Gatsby himself. Servants open doors and move about the house like choreographed dancers. The grand landscapes of New York City and Gatsby's estate look pristine. And the parties are a flapper's dream, with the vibrant outfits and music for dancing (although the occasional rap songs seemed a bit out of place).

Unfortunately, the flawlessness stops with the visuals. Reminiscent of "Moulin Rouge," Luhrmann's excessive cuts put cinematic emphasis in all the wrong places. The opening scenes fly by with exaggerated zooming and cutaways that disturb the flow of the script. Yet during the climactic standoff between Gatsby and Daisy's husband, the camera comes to a virtual standstill. Without the dialogue, it would appear no different from any other scene.

The film was also keen to draw on, and overemphasize, some of the novel's best traits. Carraway speaks Fitzgerald's words like poetry, which fans of the book will appreciate. Yet seeing them additionally written on the screen is distracting and unnecessary, no matter how artistic the font is. Likewise, the symbolisms that added such value to the novel do not translate as well on screen. We can only see the green light so many times before its significance starts to fade.

Luckily, the lead performances keep the plot comprehensible even when the camera is having a spaz attack. Few (if any) actors would be better suited as the suave, slightly obsessed Gatsby than DiCaprio. He and Maguire enliven the unlikely relationship between Gatsby and Carraway with their occasional comic relief and intimate conversations. Mulligan also gives a strong portrayal of Daisy and her struggle to choose between Gatsby and her husband.

There is potential for the film to be marginally close to par with the novel. Unfortunately, it gets lost in the pomp of Luhrmann's chaotic editing, which proves what literary purists have been saying all along: Only the book can put the "great" in "The Great Gatsby."

Stars: *** ½ (out of 5)

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THE GREAT GATSBY There is no movie I have been more prepared to dislike than this one. How dare some Aussie come over here and tell us about the meaning of one of the great works of American literature. Especially this Aussie, Baz Luhrmann, who is known to overload, over-hype and overcook his theatrical product into a glittery miasma of small meaning and little consequence. (i.e. Moulin Rouge)

But I was wrong.

Jay Gatsby has achieved success in a fashion beyond most imaginations, excepting his own. In true Horatio Alger tradition he has worked hard to improve himself, but when his past creeps up on him and threatens his well crafted self image, he suavely and effortlessly changes it, his past, and he inhabits the change until it becomes the reality. He is the self made American man in every way. He is the American success myth both personified and perverted.

Unlike Alger's heroes, he has not followed the straight and narrow. He has acquired his fabulous wealth through bootlegging and stock swindles.

This belief, that he can change his past, to correct it as it were, has given him a veneer of respectability that has put him in good stead with his underworld connections. But it is not for them that Gatsby has made this remarkable metamorphosis. No, he did everything, and I mean everything, for the love of a woman.

Daisy was Gatsby's great love, but he lost her, and now in one final herculean effort he is going to correct his past this one last time. He is going to win her back and make things as they should have been.

Leo DeCaprio is the only actor of this generation that could play Gatsby, just as Robert Redford could only play Gatsby the previous generation. Redford's Gatsby seemed reticent and insecure about his past; regretful that he must live a lie in order to accomplish his goal. DeCaprio's Gatsby is forceful, decisive; he is a determined man of significant accomplishment and great ability. He has a plan and he is going to execute it and as far as he is concerned, for all the right reasons. For myself, it is DeCaprio's best and most powerful performance.

This decision (both DeCaprio's and Luhrmann's) to take Gatsby down from some ethereal literary icon into a flesh and blood human being gives the movie an intensity that the 1974 version and most of the literary criticism of the book that I have ever read, never perceived. This is not a shining white knight rescuing a damsel in distress; this is a bare knuckles brawl for the hand of Daisy, and she is going to have to choose.

Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) is Gatsby's antagonist. He and Daisy were married when Daisy could no longer wait for Gatsby to prove himself worthy of her. Tom is as rich, maybe even richer than Gatsby, but his money is old, he is an aristocrat with a deep sense of entitlement. He has status and wealth because he's supposed to have status and wealth, and he's not about to give up all that, and certainly not his wife, to this new money usurper Gatsby, without a fight.

Bruce Dern played Tom as a kind of loopy (Dern's specialty) racial conspiracy nut, but Edgerton gives Tom a much harder edge. When Tom espouses his vile racial philosophies one might think that someday he might actually do something about it.

Daisy (Carey Mulligan) is a tough role. For all the time that Gatsby spends trying to prove he is good enough for Daisy, the audience, for the book or the film, is led down the path that she is not good enough for him. Mia Farrow played Daisy as an airhead and a dingbat, but Mulligan gives Daisy a bit more spine, and fashions a character that has a pretty good idea where her self-interests lay.

Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearse stay pretty close to the text with a few additions and devices, most notably, to those of us who read the book, know that it is Nick Caraway (Tobey Maguire) who tells the story, and is a firsthand witness to all the events, but we never knew from where he tells the story. Luhrmann tells us it is from a sanitarium where Nick is drying out from excessive alcoholism.

As for Luhrmann's reputation for excess: Well, he certainly visualizes Gatsby's parties as excess, but they are supposed to be excessive, excessive materialism is part of the point of the story. There are times when Luhrmann can't resist himself and feels the compulsion to punctuate matters with some visual flourish, but I did not find it too distracting. His decision to go 3D however, I think was wise. The characters seem to come out of the screen and get next to you. You get to know them personally, and after all this is a very personal story.

I think this story has survived the test of time so well because it is basically a love story. Whatever the viewers or readers opinion of the characters are, Gatsby and Daisy do love each other, but Fitzgerald was not interested in boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl and they all live happily ever after. Where Fitzgerald reached his own aspiration of creating high art is in wondering if living happily ever after is even possible in an age of class consciousness, even class warfare, that is driven by a compulsive materialism in a world changing so fast that we can't even formulate the question before we have to come up with an answer. Luhrmann stays true to these themes and displays an avid curiosity about them himself.

What he has created is a work of art that stands very well on its own.

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Only a poor soundtrack filled with contemporary music spoiled this latest version of The Great Gatsby for me. In a tradition of blond Gatsbys, Leonardo DiCaprio steps into the shoes of Alan Ladd and Robert Redford in essaying the part of the social climbing bootlegger from the Roaring Twenties. All that will make Jay Gatsby's life complete is the love of Daisy Buchanan whom he courted before his service in World War I. The problem is that she's slightly married to upper class Tom Buchanan. Daisy is played by Carey Mulligan and Buchanan is played by Australian player Joel Edgerton.

In fact except for DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway the whole cast is mostly Australian which is to be expected since most of the production was shot there. I have to say that the Australian studio did a marvelous job in recreating New York of the Twenties and the ritzy and glamorous part of Long Island where most of the story takes place.

As the book is written in the person of Nick Carraway it was also a good move to have Maguire narrate the story. Tobey's narration gives us the background of the story and Carraway's character functions as he should.

Leonardo DiCaprio does a wonderful job playing the social climbing Gatsby who weaves his own legend as he gives fabled parties on Long Island where the illegal liquor flows freely. Beneath his self assurance there is a bit of a frightened edge like this is all going to be taken away from him so enjoy while you can.

Perhaps the producers thought that no one would see a film with old music in it. There is some there, Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue comes to mind. But the contemporary music on the soundtrack is jarring and out of place.

But overall this is a good telling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tale of the Roaring Twenties.

Maybe it's not possible to portray one of the greatest books ever written on the silver screen. This is at least the third time and I've been really disappointed all three. Neither DiCaprio or Redford (both of whom I really like) catch the true sense of the mysterious Gatsby. At least Redford was a bit detached. His failures of the past are in his head. DiCaprio (or the script he must follow) make him seem like a giddy love soaked schoolboy. He is so obsessed as to appear weak and maudlin. Another issue, however, is with the portrayal of Nick Carraway. Tobey Maguire is just too cute. I never pictured Nick as the little boy seen here (Sam Waterston, while not perfect, at least seemed like a possibility). Again, I like Maguire in other roles, but here he seems nothing more that Gatsby's toy. He's still physically lacking as a leading man. Mostly, it just lacked a bit of pizazz. Luhrman seems to think he can do it all visually, but this is a story of lost souls, trying to recover something they can't seem to reach. It fades and fades and in the end, it's hard to care much. Also, the portrayals of Daisy and Jordan just don't seem to draw us in.