Baz Luhrmann is the sort of director who makes big, loud, glittery movies full of singing, dancing, and lavish stage numbers, so seeing as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is something of a somber story about complex characters, doomed love, and poisoned ambition, you might think that he would be a terrible fit to adapt it for the big screen. One must remember that Gatsby is also a story full of big parties, empty artifice, and the excesses of the young and wealthy, however, so a Luhrmann take on the material ends up being not without its own merits.
Luhrmann is a filmmaker whose work has historically been stylized and visually enticing to the point of distraction and tackiness, and that has always led to him having both his regular detractors as well as his regular fans—but chances are you know which side of that debate you come down on already. If you’ve liked his films before, and especially if you enjoyed his adapting a piece of classic literature with Leonardo DiCaprio as his star when he made Romeo + Juliet, then likely you’ll enjoy this one. Gatsby is an engaging story, and the screenplay that Luhrmann and his collaborator Craig Pearce put together employs enough of Fitzgerald’s prose to take things to a more introspective place than most romantic dramas attempt to reach. The only reason one would have to avoid this one is if they’re the type of person who just can’t take Luhrmann’s exaggerated, hyper-real style. Which is understandable.
Still, there are a couple of problems unique to Gatsby that keep it from being quite as strong as Luhrmann’s most loved works, like R+J or Moulin Rouge!. For one thing, Luhrmann’s use of a modern soundtrack doesn’t work as well here as it did in something like R+J. It mixes a healthy dose of the jazzy sounds of the era along with modern rap music, and given that both the Roaring 20s and today’s culture share a glamorizing of excess, that experiment is understandable, but every time a rap song that we recognize from the radio starts up the effect here is just jarring. Sticking with the music of the period would have been fine. And though Leonardo Dicaprio, Carey Mulligan, and especially Joel Edgerton are all really good as the players who make up the story’s central love triangle, Tobey Maguire remains—as ever—a limp noodle as the everyman character whose eyes we experience the story through. There’s just rarely anything either engaging or authentic about him as a performer, and his work here doesn’t prove to be an exception to that rule. Plus, you know, Daisy Buchanan is still one of the most contemptible characters in all of literature. But that’s another one of those things you’re likely to be expecting going in.
