THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)

I didn't think that Baz Luhrmann was an ideal candidate to direct a film version of The Great Gatsby, but upon seeing it, I can't really think of anyone more suited to the job.  He deals in highly stylized, overly lavish excesses: not the sort that you'd go to for an adaptation of a well-known novel set against a real period in American history (Luhrmann is Australian, to boot).  But the style actually works, and the surprise is that Luhrmann understands the novel and doesn't upstage the material with pyrotechnics.  He also avoids the over-reverence that usually affects adaptations of well-known and popular material, and adapts it into a movie of his own.

It's not a perfect film, as no adaptation of a highly regarded novel should be expected to be.  To ensure that F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose isn't tossed aside, Luhrmann frames the film by having his narrator, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), write his account of the story to a psychiatrist.  The device works, since Nick's narration suggests that his story is told in the form of a book to begin with.  Still, the voice-over narration grows tiring, as the film depends more and more on Nick's voice than on what it shows us.  I'm convinced that the best way to adapt a book to the screen is simply to translate the story into the language of film and ditch the prose.  We may lose much of Fitzgerald's genius, but so what?  The Great Gatsby is meant to be a novel and a novel it shall remain.

Nick arrives in West Egg, the Long Island home of the nouveau riche, as a young bond salesman on Wall Street.  His neighbor, the mysterious J. Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), is the talk of the town, a thrower of gigantic open-invitation parties attended by everyone from senators to movie stars.  Nick's cousin is Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), who he learns is an old flame of Gatsby's.  Gatsby painstakingly arranges, through Nick, that they meet again, and that she might fall in love with him again.  Daisy is married to the insufferable bully Tom (Joel Edgerton), who's having an affair with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of his mechanic.

Both the movie and the novel are set not in a realistic version of 1920s New York, but in the version of Nick's memory.  Gatsby and company are meant to inhabit a grandiose, flamboyant, cartoonish world of extremes.  The Great Depression had not happened yet when Fitzgerald wrote the novel, but it makes sense for the story to be told through that lens, as a remembrance of a booming, gaudy, extravagant era that is long gone.

Luhrmann wisely doesn't portray the wild parties in a condescending way, as Jack Clayton did in the dour 1974 film.  Rather, he gives us a visual spectacle that, if it doesn't approach the parodic glitz of Moulin Rouge, gives us a reason to believe Nick's attraction to Gatsby and the identity he's created.  Nick Carraway is not what you'd call a critical narrator, and we only see Gatsby through his positively rosy lens.  The doe-eyed Maguire is perfectly cast.

Luhrmann resists the urge to make the film into a circus; though the film is hardly spare when it comes to visuals, he knows when to let them drop away.  The crowdedness and cacophony of the early party scenes makes way for a loneliness that comes later on.  The hip-hop score, produced by Jay-Z, is an appropriate representation of the jazz age in today's terms, though there is one irritating and awful Lana Del Rey weepie that wears out its welcome and refuses to go away.

As Daisy, Mulligan pins down a character that is difficult to capture.  Her heart is required to travel in so many directions that it's a task not to turn her into a squawking mess (as Mia Farrow did in 1974), but Mulligan's performance is authentic throughout.  As Tom, Edgerton is a perfect bully: loud, brutish, childish, cowardly.

Because the movie is economical in its treatment of its supporting characters, it loses some of the verisimilitude of the novel.  We see a lot of Gatsby and Nick, but very little of the people that make up their environment.  There's far too little of Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), the sharp-witted golfer who's fixed up with Nick by Daisy and Tom.  Debicki, whose second film this is, ambles away with what little screen time she has.

There's also too little of Myrtle and her husband George, who in the novel give an idea of the rich classes' ambivalence toward the poor, as well as the corrupted American Dream represented in Myrtle's desire for Tom.  Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke are good in these roles, but Luhrmann doesn't pay them much attention.  Still, an early Manhattan party scene is memorable, and Adelaide Clemens (last seen as the apple of Benedict Cumberbatch's eye in "Parade's End") is a scene-stealer in a brief role as Myrtle's obnoxious sister Catherine.

Like Daisy, Gatsby is a difficult character to find, as he's always putting on a show for someone.  DiCaprio knows this, and gives his Gatsby two personalities: the Jay Gatsby he wants the world to know, and the James Gatz he actually is.  The elevated tone with which he utters "old sport" sounds casually false, as it's meant to.  DiCaprio ably finds the purity in a character who is rarely genuine to anyone.

Gatsby's drive captures the attention, and later the sympathy, of Nick, and Luhrmann's success is that he shows us how Nick comes to idolize him so.  It works because Luhrmann brings a restraint that's not common to his other films.  The ending, in which Nick finishes the "book" he's been writing, would be silly in a film that didn't earn it, but this one does.  The final shot, quiet and sad, is what I've always pictured the ending of The Great Gatsby to be.

*** out of ****