Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby'

'Tis the season for cinematic trashing of great literature. Not to be outdone by Joe Wright's recent vulgarization of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Baz Luhrmann has now travestied F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby.

Gatsby, more or less a commercial flop on its initial publication in 1925 (it would have done far worse if Zelda Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins hadn't talked Scott out of his preferred title, Trimalchio in West Egg), became a perennial bestseller after being force-fed to troops in World War II, though the literacy level has obviously fallen far since then. It has received five film adaptations (not to mention one for the stage), the most notable being Jack Clayton's 1974 version with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston and Bruce Dern.

Farrow and Dern, at least, were ideally cast as Daisy and Tom Buchanan— Farrow for her waifish, evasive vulnerability, and Dern for his crackling nastiness. No such successes can be found in Luhrmann's film, but then it's hard to imagine any acting performance surviving this director's cinematic mugging.

Mating call

Fitzgerald's plot is far-fetched enough. Jay Gatsby, né Gatz, is a poor boy who falls in love with a rich debutante, Daisy. They are separated by his induction into the army during World War I, and Daisy marries Tom, a man of her own class. Gatsby, meanwhile, gets fabulously if mysteriously rich, builds a huge mansion across the bay from the Buchanan estate from which he pines for Daisy, and throws big parties which become fashionable among the nouveaux riche.

These efforts constitute an elaborate mating call for the personally reclusive Gatsby, who finally gets to meet Daisy only through the offices of her poor cousin, Nick Carraway. Gatsby and Daisy rekindle their romance; but in a showdown with Tom, Daisy opts to remain with her husband (it's the only effective scene in Luhrmann's film, even if characteristically histrionic). Daisy is responsible for the accidental death of Tom's shantytown mistress, Myrtle, on her way back from this confrontation, and Tom directs the wrath of Myrtle's husband George onto Gatsby, whom George kills.

This melodramatic scenario, narrated by Nick, is textured in the novel by Fitzgerald's wry observations on the mores of the newly rich, but no such subtleties detain Luhrmann. As in Wright's Anna Karenina, Luhrmann is preoccupied by spectacle— orgiastic revelry in Gatsby, as opposed to the imperial balls of Tolstoy— and in camp theatricalization as a means of taking down what little of dramatic integrity remains to his characters.

Dime novel plot?

In Gatsby, Luhrmann's device of choice is an updated version of 3-D that blows curtains and snowflakes in one's face. When the characters are foregrounded against the illusionist depth of the camera, they look like cardboard cutouts.

No purpose is served by this gimmick except to call attention to Luhrmann as puppet master. He doesn't want you to believe in the characters— only the cleverness with which he deconstructs the vision of his elders and betters. Luhrmann even makes the superficial resemblances of Anna Karenina and Gatsby— mismatched lovers, a jealous husband, a climactic death caused by a motor conveyance— look like variations on the same dime novel plot.

When we meet Luhrmann's Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), he turns a knowing and seductive smile on Nick, who observes that it's one of the rarely charming looks one encounters in life. What I thought instead was how much DiCaprio's studied expression seemed an attempt to channel the kind of corrupting smile Orson Welles always brought off, and how splendidly the young Welles could have played Gatsby.

Beneath Di Caprio's skin

Of course, Welles did just that in Citizen Kane, a film that perhaps owes as much to The Great Gatsby as to the real-life magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles would have captured the essence of what Gatsby represented for Fitzgerald: the immense ambition and raw energy of the driven social climber whose success masks the most annihilating inner emptiness— the tragedy, in short, of the Horatio Alger prototype in the real world.

DiCaprio, a very careful and sometimes technically impressive actor who rarely delves far beneath the skin, never gets past first base with Gatsby, not that Luhrmann would have allowed him to. Tobey Maguire is likewise out of his depth with Nick, a character whose peculiar attachment and ultimate loyalty to Gatsby cries out for exploration. Carey Milligan's Daisy is a kewpie doll whose interest to either Gatsby or Tom is inexplicable.

Only Joel Edgerton's Tom provides some interest. His character is crass, bigoted and morally detestable, but he's a man who stands up in the end and gets what he wants, and his victory feels like the film's only real moment. It's also over the top— Fitzgerald wants us to feel less that Tom has won Daisy anew than that the two deserve each other— but at least there's a spark of life in it.

How I'd do it

How should one do The Great Gatsby in our modern Gilded Age? I'd take it out of the 1920s and give it a contemporary setting. Gatsby would be a hedge fund manager instead of a hooch runner. He'd have a slew of lobbyists and accountants at the ready rather than, as in this Gatsby, a single funereal butler bringing him the phone and whispering "Philadelphia" or "Chicago." Daisy would be an Ivy League graduate on her own way up the ladder. Tom would be the CEO of a bank too big to fail.

As for Baz Luhrmann, he'd be banned from the set, and never allowed anywhere near a good book again.