About ten years ago, film director, Baz Luhrmann, wondered why The Great Gatsby succeeded as a novel, but always failed as a movie. He never found out. But that didn’t stop him. According to an article by Michael Cieply in The New York Times (1/17/12), “Baz. Luhrmann – the Australian director of films like “Australia” and “Moulin Rouge!” - is planning to release a star-packed, high-budget version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s much-admired novel of the Jazz Age next Christmas.”
Both the weaknesses and strengths of The Great Gatsby defy dramatization, but it’s easy to see why filmmakers are tempted. They think, “White suits! Mansions! Limousines! Best of all, we get intellectual credentials by adapting a classic of American literature.” The last director to fall into this trap was Jack Clayton in 1974. You may not have heard of him, but the star of the film, Robert Redford, is well known. So is its screenwriter, a fellow by the name of Francis Ford Coppola. (I hear they’ve both done some directing.) Why did all their combined talents produce nothing more than a sleeping pill? No mystery. Anyone who attempts to dramatize Gatsby faces the same four challenges. One, a stupid plot: some claptrap about seeking the girl of your dreams in Great Neck, Long Island - with a side trip to Queens. Two, weak characters: the women are playthings; the men are macho jerks, sniveling wannabes and the title character, who is vague until the end, when he is less than he seems. Three, doing justice to not one, but two themes that are central to American culture: our worship of success in the form of money and the belief that we can always re-invent ourselves. Finally, there’s the language – the gorgeous, poetic style in which the novel is written. Any filmmaker who attempts to put Fitzgerald on the screen must find a visual analog for his literary style.
No amount of gangsters, flappers or millionaires will suffice unless they “. . . came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars.” Cast any actress you want as Daisy Buchanan - unless “Her voice is full of money . . . the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it” she’s wasting her time. You can show a man brooding at the end of a pier, but how do you convey, “He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
The first choice (and last resort) of most directors would be a voiceover narration. A famously weak device, all voiceovers say the same thing: you couldn’t come up with a visual solution. (Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Baz Luhrmann had a better idea. At least, he thought he did. Shoot it in 3-D! It occurred to him while listening to James Cameron talk about “Avatar.” What convinced him was Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder, a film that hasn’t been seen in 3-D since it was first released in 1954. In fact, Mr. Cieply writes, “He found only two projectors, one in New York, one in Burbank, Calif., that could still play that film.” Why exactly was seeing Ray Milland in 3-D a revelation? “‘It was like theater,’ Mr. Luhrmann said.”
Hmmm. He seems to be going in a different direction entirely. Maybe it’s not the literary style that matters? Maybe the thrill of getting up close and personal with Leonardo DiCaprio is enough? A lot of people are betting a lot of money that it is. How much money? According to Mr. Cieply, The Great Gatsby “. . . was shot in Australia, with a budget of roughly $125 million before government rebates.” So, even if moviegoers stay away in droves, Australian citizens will have the thrill of watching their tax dollars go down the drain clockwise (or so they say.)
To his credit, Mr. Luhrmann admits the project is not without controversy. “But Fitzgerald, he insisted, would have approved. ‘He was a modernist,’ Mr. Luhrmann said, ‘He was very influenced by the cinema.’” I’ll say. Within three years of moving to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, F. Scott Fitzgerald had drunk himself to death.
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