Like so many teens, I first read "The Great Gatsby" in high school and absolutely loved it. It was one of very few books I read, out of choice, more than once. So when our English class got the chance to see the film adaptation (with Robert Redford as Gatsby) I was really excited - I mean, I loved films, I loved "Gatsby" so put them together and... Oh, dear.
I remember only two things about the film (1) I was amazed at quite how boring the story could be made in the right hands and (2) the shirt sequence. Oh, the shirt sequence - with the pastel colored linen flying from left to right and right to left... in hilariously overplayed slow motion. It took me another reading of the book to confirm that, yes, it really was the film that was awful, not the original material.
The shirt sequence is here too, in Baz Luhrman's "Gatsby" (as it in the book), but there's no slow motion, no rapturous shots of Mia Farrow lost in shirt-rapture. Instead it plays like the scene it is - with Gatsby acting as a child showing off in front of his girl, and Daisy clearly reacting poignantly to his naive flirtation, not to the shirts themselves.
To my surprise, I really liked Luhrman's take on the novel. Luhrman always does a good job with over-the-top surfaces, but he's not exactly known for his emotional depth. And to be sure, the surfaces in "Gatsby" are stunning - Luhrman's hyperbole and gaudiness fit perfectly the spirit of Gatsby's bacchanals and the hyped-up spirit of the Roaring Twenties. That's what I'd expected of Luhrman and he delivers fabulously - but what impressed me even more is how he handles the quieter moments, as when Gatsby asks Nick to bring Daisy over for tea in the shadow of his walled-off mansion. Luhrman uses CGI skilfully to bring an era to life, especially the depressed, industrial no-man's-land that bridges West and East Eggs with the hopped-up energy of New York City.
Luhrman is not known as an actor's Director, but the performances here are first class, allowing us to understand and feel for characters who are not intrinsically relatable to those of us outside of the 1%. Leonardo DiCaprio was born to play Gatsby and he wears the role, which comes with almost impossible expectations, very well indeed. Indeed, all the cast are great. Tobey Maguire's mild-mannered awkwardness works as go-between Nick Carroway, and while it would be easy to play the character simply as a spectator and catalyst for the plot, Maguire does well to suggest that Carroway has much more of an idea of what he's doing than he might admit.
Carey Mulligan, with her natural soulfulness, does a great job with Daisy - bringing emotional depth, vulnerability and genuine playfulness to a character who is essentially a bored aristocrat's wife. Joel Edgerton, an actor I'd never really noticed before, is an excellent Tom Buchanan, capturing both Tom's selfish blindness and his ability to cut others to the core, as well as his pure animal brutality and hedonism.
I had very limited expectations coming into this film, but I enjoyed it, I was moved by it and I would gladly watch it again.
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