I also want to take a moment to make a pedantic, terribly unimportant announcement. I started the Jews In Mass Blog three-and-a-half years ago, beset with a tendency toward self-indulgent rambling and a hope that my writing "might cheer someone up, make them think, inspire them, change their life just a teensy-weensy bit for the better." The fact that it seems to have done a few of those things is no small source of joy. Yet that joy is tempered with a smidge of irritation; you see, I have not been, for the last several years, a student at a Catholic school. As those who know me are aware, I also have not been terribly Jewish, at least not in the traditional sense (that's for another post). Thus my blog title is inaccurate, which bothers me in a way that it can only bother an obsessive, slightly off-kilter writer such as myself. As such, this is my last post at Jews In Mass. It is fitting that said post is a movie review, and that the movie features Carey Mulligan. My first movie review on this site was of An Education, and in that review I praised the picture and Ms. Mulligan, its breakout star. Three years later, she's the female lead in one of the summer's biggest tentpoles, The Great Gatsby, which I review below. To paraphrase my favorite line from that Ulysses book I just finished: She has traveled. And so, I think, have I.
I will soon acquire a new blog, complete with a new title and a new URL. I'll link to my old stuff from this site, so those who wish to see it may do so. Finally: my boundless gratitude to all who've read this blog of their own free will, or who have submitted to my endless coercion. Your praise has done dangerous things to my ego; your criticism has done wonderful things to my writing. I'll close with a line from my favorite Dylan Thomas poem;
"I who was rich
Was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days."
Enjoy the review, my friends, and I hope to see you at the new blog!
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The Great Gatsby
In my view, Baz Luhrman is unmistakably a magician of the cinema. No matter how flattering that statement sounds on its face, it must not be taken as an out and out compliment; after all, it gives no insight into the quality of the man's tricks. Every Luhrmann film (and I do mean every one) is an extended magic show, a splashy, dizzying assemblage of florid magic acts designed to draw the overpowered viewer into an ecstatic state of total surrender to a surreal, sensual unreality. Some of those acts are pure brilliance, Houdini-esque distillations of careful planning and ingenious execution. Others are underthought, sloppily-executed conceits that might make GOB Bluth blush in embarrassment. With this in mind, the criterion for evaluating a Luhrmann picture is pretty clear; do the dazzlers outweigh the duds? With Gatsby, the answer is neither an exultant "yes!" nor a shrill, Pauline Kaelian cry of "no!"; it is a resigned sigh, an admission that the whole affair is, as many of us expected, a minor disappointment.
Let us first dispense with the most obvious, and, indeed, inevitable disappointment--it's not as good as the book. Then again, how on God's green earth could it be? Fitzgerald's capital-G Great novel is the best work of tragedy in the entirety of American literature, just as Huck Finn is our best comedy. The story of the titular millionaire (played here by Leo DiCaprio), his lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan), and the man who falls into their doomed orbit (Nick Carraway, portrayed by Tobey Maguire), Gatsby is a penetrating expose of the internal contradictions of our national identity. Better yet, it is an expose animated by Fitzgerald's distinctive prose style, one of the most eloquent and erudite you're likely to find in a modern author. The film does its very best to etch in images the sorts of deeply private yearnings and sharp social commentary Fitzgerald set up so deftly with his golden pen; heck, Luhrmann even shoves Word-Art-ified clumps of Fitzgerald's words up on the screen every now and then. But, like every adaptation before it, this Gatsby just can't capture the distinct feel of the novel, its ineffable blend of sacred and profane, the timely and the timeless. Then again, asking Luhrmann to do Fitzgerald's book justice is sort of like asking someone else to make my Grandma's patented beef stew; no matter what recipe you're working from or what utensils you're using, your hands aren't hers, so you can't pull it off. Gatsby the book is unmatchable. The movie doesn't match it. Surprise. I can't really fault it for that.
What I can fault Gatsby for is it, to borrow a phrase from Emperor Palpatine, its lack of vision. Sure, Luhrmann had an idea; to use contemporary tunes and music video editing to make the Jazz Age scandalous again, the same way he used Christina Aguilera and jump cuts to make the Moulin Rouge as scuzzily magnetic to us as it was to those 19th century men who came to watch the can-can dancers. In the latter movie, the modernizing approach worked; in the former, it does not. When Luhrmann was subversive in Moulin Rouge, he was clever about it; in Gatsby, the subversion comes off as half-hearted and arbitrary. The genius of Moulin Rouge (which is, by the way, one of my favorite films of the previous decade) was the way it took well-known songs and cannily recontextualized them. To watch that film is to marvel as how Luhrmann folded his anachronistic soundtrack effectively and organically into the story. "Look!", us fans thought, "They turned 'Roxanne' into a tango! Brilliant! Whoah! They put David Bowie and Dolly Parton in a medley, topped it off with a dash of opera, and somehow made it work!" Gatsby, by contrast, inspires no such sense of awe; for me at least, all it inspired was a series of chilly acknowledgments. "Oh. They're dancing to hip-hop. Instead of jazz. I get it."
It is saddening that Luhrmann's Big Clever Approach to this material isn't that Big or Clever; it is flat-out annoying to see it applied so haphazardly, so inconsistently. As Nick enters one of Gatsby's famed soirees, they're blasting Fergie; as he readies to leave, they're dancing to Gershwin. The picture is half revisionist, half-historically accurate. The visual style is similarly schizophrenic, sometimes awash in a soft, Golden Era haze, other times assailing us with choppy, pseudo-incoherent music video cuts. Speaking of music; if you're going to have Florence Welch and Beyonce record tracks for your film, do more than play those tracks as incidental music underneath cocktail chatter. Say what you will about Moulin Rouge, but you must give Luhrmann credit for taking a bold concept and putting it front and center; the idea behind this Gatsby is much less bold, and it is enforced with such timidity and inconsistency that you just wish they'd made a straight-up adaptation and called it a day.
You may have noticed that I have, until now, avoided the actors. That is because I have saved the best for last. Set loose in Luhrmann's wild and maddening jungle, they have, for the most part, acquitted themselves well. Best of all is DiCaprio's Gatsby. From the moment he appears on the screen, his electric blue eyes gazing right into us, he is the character, plain and simple. Though we would not have guessed it from pretty-boy days in the 90's, it turns out that Leo's great quality as an actor is his intelligence, his ability to look as though he is constantly calculating or reflecting upon something never seen but eternally present. This quality doesn't always suit him well, but it is perfect for Gatsby, a man whose mind works so fervently and feverishly to present an outward appearance of effortless, good-humoured suavity. The film's other great performance is that of Joel Edgerton, who plays Daisy's unfaithful husband, Tom; he towers in his brutish anger, but takes care to show us every now and then how small this poor man really is. His climactic confrontation with DiCaprio is by far the best scene in the picture, and fans of the book should watch the film at some point just to see it. The other two leads aren't half bad either--Mulligan sells Daisy's "who, me?" sex appeal and nails her barely hidden neurosis, while Maguire, although a little too old for the part, is the first actor to really capture Nick's love for Gatsby, a potent concoction that's about one part homoerotic attraction and ten parts naive idol worship. Maguire reminds us that, when all is said and done, the narrator's heart is as broken as that of the man he's narrating about.
In the spirit of charity, I should also note that, at the film's end, Luhrmann scores a few points as well. As it all comes to a close around that famed, blood-tainted pool, the director summons his creative faculties and fires a strong, solid parting shot, one that shows us just how good the rest of the picture could have been if it had struck a similar balance of reverence and experimentation, restraint and innovation. As I reflect upon this honorable mess of a Gatsby, which has the notable yet dubious honor of being the best out of a string of failed film adaptations, I hear the voice of Louis Sachar; "If only, if only, the woodpecker sighs." But above all, I hear the voice of Fitzgerald's single most unforgettable character, saying in his distinctive cosmopolitan drawl; "Nice try, old sport." C+
