Our long national nightmare has opened: The Great Gatsby is finally in theaters. As my first two posts on the subject (3/18/12, 4/10/13) note, I have serious doubts about making a film from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. No longer. Having seen director - and screenwriter – Baz Luhrmann’s recent attempt, I can report that better movies have been made from worse books than The Great Gatsby, but I can’t think of a worse movie that was made from a better one.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, isn’t famous for it’s characters or plot, it’s famous in spite of them. The book’s true distinction lies in its gorgeous written style, tragic sensibility and powerful American themes, which get more powerful with time. How do you get a great movie out of such an unlikely – and unpromising – group of qualities? A lot of people bet a lot of money that Baz Luhrmann knew the answer. A lot of people are wrong.
Mr. Luhrmann’s biggest problem is that he’s faithful to the book. His version has authentically flat characters and an authentically weak plot. The men: Tom Buchanan (JOEL EDGERTON) Nick Carraway (TOBEY MAGUIRE) and Jay Gatsby (LEO DICAPRIO) are, respectively, a macho jerk, a simpering fool and a mysterious figure who’s less than he appears. The women, embodied by Daisy Buchanan (CAREY MULLIGAN) are rich men’s playthings with the depth, but not the abilities, of polo ponies. (Shooting them in 3-D, by the way, doesn’t make these characters less flat – unless your idea of literature was formed by pop-up books.) The plot is some claptrap about seeking the girl of your dreams in Great Neck with a side trip to Queens. Worst of all, Mr. Luhrmann is faithful to the novel’s written style – as written style. A visual solution being, apparently, out of the question, great gouts of Fitzgerald’s language are embalmed in a nearly constant voiceover and some actually appear as words on a page. If that’s not literal enough, words appear on the screen itself. Hmmm. That leaves tragic sensibility and powerful themes, not exactly pillars of American filmmaking.
Spoiler alert: Gatsby dies in the end, but it’s not tragic because, like every character in the film, he’s unsympathetic from beginning to end. No one in the film – or the audience – cares if Jay Gatsby dies except for Nick Carraway, who should know better, and the man who kills Gatsby, George Wilson (JASON CLARKE) who’s so dumb, he can’t know better.
Perhaps the easiest problem to fix would, at first glance, seem to be the hardest: dealing with themes. That takes a lot of thinking, right? It can – if you’re into literary interpretation – but it’s not necessary. Baz Luhrmann shows us how to do it without any thinking. The idea that Americans worship success in the form of money is splattered throughout this movie. What screams wealth more than a chrome yellow Duesenberg with a lot of chrome, an enormous mansion (with an unsettling resemblance to Hogwarts) and jazz-fueled parties with a thousand dancing, champagne -swilling guests? The only problem is that, like screaming, this visual assault cannot be sustained. It palls after (I’ll be generous) five minutes.
The other theme, the uniquely American ability to re-invent yourself, should have been even easier to render, but Baz bungles it. Doubly ironic since Fitzgerald hands it to him on silver platter. The novel closes with the revelation that, as a child, James Gatz (the main character’s real name) wrote a poignant list of personal goals inside his copy of “Hopalong Cassidy.” It includes, “Rise from bed 6:00 AM, Study electricity, etc. 7:15 AM - 8:15 AM, Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM” and “GENERAL RESOLVES: Read one self-improving book or magazine per week, Save $5.00 (crossed out) $3.00 per week, Be better to parents.” Not only does it speak to re-invention and the worship of success, but it finds the child in the man, making him sympathetic. What’s more, it expresses the tragedy that should be at the heart of The Great Gatsby: That Gatz/Gatsby’s life ended when he stopped thinking about the future and started becoming obsessed with the past. Sad enough? Not quite. The book is delivered to Nick Carraway by Gatsby’s father, Henry Gatz, who travels from rural Minnesota to New York for his son’s funeral. None of which is in Luhrman’s film.
Don’t get me wrong. It may be difficult to assemble a great film out of these elements, but it is far from impossible. If you want a movie about a dazzling, mysterious and somewhat louche glamourpuss, who gives great parties, is observed with fascination by her neighbor, a writer, and has her cover blown when a figure from her past - an aging, rural relative – arrives in New York, I give you Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) directed by Blake Edwards and based on Truman Capote’s novel. Should you prefer an original screenplay with a more noir-ish, almost ghoulish tone, I refer you to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). It’s the story of a fabulously wealthy, glamorous and mysterious silent film star, who lives in a huge mansion, is completely obsessed with the past and pays an enormous price for trying to relive it. Not as big a price, however, as the struggling writer who observes her with fascination and winds up floating face down in her pool because she’s shot him in the back. If you haven’t seen this classic movie, don’t worry. The pool scene is exactly the same one Baz Luhrmann uses at the end of The Great Gatsby, right down to seeing DiCaprio’s face and the journalists ringing the pool as we look up from underwater.
Not that this movie is irredeemable. There are, in all fairness, some good things about it. I look great in my Gatsby-inspired, pink linen jacket from Brooks Brothers, my wife loves her Gatsby-esque diamond headpiece with detachable brooch from Tiffany and we both enjoyed our visit to the Gatsby Suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
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