Subtlety is not a one of Austrialian writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s strong suits. The filmmaker’s lavish and frenetic style is crucial to the appeal of his works (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, Australia). While often as wobbly and sticky-sweet as a cosmopolitan-soaked clubgoer, Luhrmann’s films possess the redemptive glint of pure, freewheeling cinema.
The director’s extravagant methods are both an asset and a weakness in his brazenly anachronistic, digitally engorged take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. No other filmmaker could likely portray the never-was New York of the Jazz Age with such glittering excess. If it achieves nothing else, Luhrmann’s adaptation provides the definitive depiction of millionaire Jay Gatsby’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) jaw-dropping weekend galas, which are part Busby Berkeley musical and part Studio 54 bacchanalia. One can discern how narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) could be entangled in such an exhilarating world—and made complicit in the doomed romance between Gatsby and the Mrs. Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).
The film’s glitzy, over-the-top approach is generally apt, but often feels at once portentous and paper-thin. It’s a C+ high school essay on the Themes and Symbols of The Great Gatsby gussied up with a rhinestone cover. Case in point: the green light on the Buchanans’ pier, a potent emblem that devolves into an overstated annoyance in Luhrmann’s hands. (The beacon even has a sound effect.) This sort of small-minded fixation abounds in the film. In the end, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is buoyed by its razzle-dazzle, but its existence underlines that a cinematic version of that Great American Novel that is both enticing and thoughtful, if such a thing is possible, has yet to arrive.
