If you've seen Lurhmann's "Strictly Ballroom," "Romeo + Juliet" or "Moulin Rouge," or watched "Gatsby" trailers, you know what you're in for: an epic melodrama that fuses old-movie theatrics and subjective filmmaking, period music and modern pop, real sets and unreal landscapes, psychological drama and speeded-up slapstick.
We see the book's Prohibition-era settings (East Egg and West Egg, New York City, and the sooty wasteland in between) through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), who's writing a memoir-confession from an asylum. This framing device is inferred from statements Fitzgerald made in "The Crack-Up," and "Gatsby" often refers to itself as a book, so even though it isn't officially part of the source, it's hardly a blasphemous indulgence; still, it's one more buffer between viewer and story in a movie that already has more than its share.
All this busywork might astonish if Lurhmann's heart were in it—but is it? The guests at Gatsby's party are too obviously directed, and there's no sense of escalation in the gatherings. From frame one, they're Dionysian whirls of booze, lust and hero worship, minus the sense that that things are ebbing and flowing as they would at a real party. The CGI-assisted camera acrobatics feel obligatory. So do the anachronistic soundtrack mash-ups (modern hip-hop layered over ragtime piano and the like).
But in the film's dark second half, "The Great Gatsby" half-forgets its mandate to wow us and zeroes in on actors in rooms. Once that happens, the Luhrmannerisms distract from the film's true heart: the actions and feelings of its characters. Luhrmann didn't set out to make a PBS-style, bare-bones adaptation, but there are times when it feels as though he secretly wants to.
Once you get past the movie's opening eruptions of visual excess — hundreds of party guests boozing and hollering and doing the Charleston; CGI cityscapes that visualize 1920s New York by way of Warren Beatty's candy-colored "Dick Tracy"; a long expository talk between Gatsby and Nick in a careening computer-buffed roadster that moves as believably as the talking cab in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" — "The Great Gatsby" settles into a traditional groove: scene, scene, montage, scene, burst of violence, moment of reflection. The movie wants to be a "kaleidoscopic carnival," to quote a phrase from the book's description of a Jay Gatsby party, but Luhrmann's instincts seem more traditional, even square, and the two impulses cancel each out. Once you've spent time with his cast, you understand why he was torn.
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