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The Current Cinema

MAY 13, 2013 ISSUE

All That Jazz

“The Great Gatsby.”
BY DAVID DENBY

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in Baz

Luhrmann’s new movie.
ILLUSTRATION BY RON KURNIAWAN

W
hen “The Great Gatsby” was published, on
April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald, living
high in France after his early success, cabled Max
Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and demanded to
know if the news was good. Mostly, it was not. The
book received some reviews that were dismissive (“F.
SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD,” a
headline in the New York World ran) and others
that were pleasant but patronizing. Fitzgerald later
complained to his friend Edmund Wilson that “of
all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one
had the slightest idea what the book was about.” For a writer of Fitzgerald’s fame, sales
were mediocre—about twenty thousand copies by the end of the year. Scribners did a
second printing, of three thousand copies, but that was it, and when Fitzgerald died, in
1940, half-forgotten at the age of forty-four, the book was hard to find.

The tale of Fitzgerald’s woeful stumbles—no great writer ever hit the skids so publicly
—is suffused with varying shades of irony, both forlorn and triumphal. Fitzgerald was
an alcoholic, and no doubt his health would have declined, whatever the commercial
fate of his masterpiece. But he was a writer who needed recognition and money as
much as booze, and if “Gatsby” had sold well it would likely have saved him from the
lacerating public confessions of failure that he made in the nineteen-thirties, or, at least,
would have kept him away from Hollywood. (He did get a fascinating, half-finished
novel, “The Last Tycoon,” out of the place, but his talents as a screenwriter were too
fine-grained for M-G-M.) At the same time, the initial failure of “Gatsby” has yielded
an astounding coda: the U.S. trade-paperback edition of the book currently sells half a
million copies a year. Jay Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” and
his exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America,
in its self-creation and its failures. The strong, delicate, poetically resonant text has
become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion
requires.

In 1925, Fitzgerald sent copies of “Gatsby” to Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and T.
S. Eliot, who wrote thank-you notes that served to canonize the book when Wilson
reprinted them, in “The Crack-Up” (1945), a miscellany of Fitzgerald’s writing and
letters. All three let the young author know that he had done something that defined
modernity. Edith Wharton praised the scene early in the novel when the coarsely
philandering Tom Buchanan takes Nick Carraway—the shy young man who narrates
the story—to an apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle, in Washington Heights.
Wharton described the scene as a “seedy orgy.” With its stupid remarks leading
nowhere, its noisy, trivial self-dramatization, the little gathering marks a collapse of the
standards of social conduct. In its acrid way, the episode is satirical, but an abyss slowly
opens. Some small expectation of grace has vanished.

I thought of Wharton’s phrase when I saw the new, hyperactive 3-D version of “The
Great Gatsby,” by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (“Strictly Ballroom,” “Moulin
Rouge!”). Luhrmann whips Fitzgerald’s sordid debauch into a saturnalia—garish and
violent, with tangled blasts of music, not all of it redolent of the Jazz Age. ( Jay-Z is
responsible for the soundtrack; Beyoncé and André 3000 sing.) Fitzgerald’s scene at the
apartment gives off a feeling of sinister incoherence; Luhrmann’s version is merely a
frantic jumble. The picture is filled with an indiscriminate swirling motion, a thrashing
impress of “style” (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), thrown at us with whooshing
camera sweeps and surges and rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D.
Fitzgerald wrote of Jay Gatsby, “He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means
anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a
vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatsby’s excess—his house, his clothes, his
celebrity guests—is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann’s vulgarity is
designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than
a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

The mistakes begin with the narrative framing device. In the book, Nick has gone
home to the Midwest after a bruising time in New York; everything he tells us of
Gatsby and Daisy and the rest is a wondering recollection. Luhrmann and his frequent
collaborator, the screenwriter Craig Pearce, have turned the retreating Nick into an
alcoholic drying out at a sanatorium. He pulls himself together and, with hardly any
sleep, composes the entire text of “The Great Gatsby.” He types, right on the
manuscript, “by Nick Carraway.” (No doubt a manuscript of “Lolita by Humbert
Humbert” will show up in future movie adaptations of Nabokov’s novel.) The
filmmakers have literalized Fitzgerald’s conceit that Nick wrote the text—unnecessarily,
since, for most of the rest of the movie, we readily accept his narration as a simple
voice-over. Doubling down on their folly, Pearce and Luhrmann print famous lines
from the book as Nick labors at his desk. The words pop onto the screen like escapees
from a bowl of alphabet soup.

When Luhrmann calms down, however, and concentrates on the characters, he

demonstrates an ability with actors that he hasn’t shown in the past. Tobey Maguire,
with his grainy but distinct voice, his asexual reserve, makes a fine, lonely Nick
Carraway. He looks at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby with amazement and, eventually,
admiration. As Nick slowly discovers that his Long Island neighbor is at once a ruthless
gangster, a lover of unending dedication, and a man who wears pink suits as a spiritual
project, some of the book’s exhilarating complexity comes through. (The love between
Nick and Gatsby is the strongest emotional tie in the movie.) DiCaprio, thirty-eight,
still has a golden glow: swept-back blond hair, glittering blue-green eyes, smooth tawny
skin. The slender, cat-faced boy of “Titanic” now looks solid and substantial, and he
speaks with a dominating voice. He’s certainly a more forceful Gatsby than placid
Robert Redford was in the tastefully opulent but inert adaptation of the book from
1974. DiCaprio has an appraising stare and he re-creates Fitzgerald’s description of
Gatsby’s charm: that he can look at someone for an instant and understand how, ideally,
he or she wants to be seen.

As Daisy, the English actress Carey Mulligan makes a good entrance, with nothing but
her hand lofted over the back of a couch and a tinkling voice to accompany it. Mulligan
is not elegantly beautiful, but she’s a touching actress, and, when Tom and Gatsby fight
over Daisy, her face crumples and her eyes tear. Mulligan makes it clear how much
Daisy is a shaky projection of male fantasy. The men struggle to possess her; she doesn’t
possess herself. As the brutal Tom, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton is so unappealing
that Daisy’s initial love for him seems impossible, but Luhrmann makes the climactic
fight between Tom and Gatsby a genuine explosion—the dramatic highlight of this
director’s career.

The rest of the movie offers fake explosions. Luhrmann turns Gatsby’s big parties into
a writhing mass of flesh, feathers, dropped waists, cloche hats, swinging pearls, flying
tuxedos, fireworks, and breaking glass. There are so many hurtling, ecstatic bodies and
objects that you can’t see much of anything in particular. When the characters roar into
the city, Times Square at night is just a sparkle of digitized colors. Luhrmann
presumably wants to crystallize the giddy side of twenties wealth and glamour, but he
confuses tumult with style and often has trouble getting the simple things right. Gatsby
and Nick have their crucial meeting with the criminal Meyer Wolfsheim, but the
director, perhaps not wishing to be accused of anti-Semitism, cast the distinguished
Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan as the Jewish gangster. This makes no sense, since the
gangster’s name remains Wolfsheim and Tom later refers to him as “that kike.”

Will young audiences go for this movie, with its few good scenes and its discordant
messiness? Luhrmann may have miscalculated. The millions of kids who have read the
book may not be eager for a flimsy phantasmagoria. They may even think, like many of
their elders, that “The Great Gatsby” should be left in peace. The book is too intricate,
too subtle, too tender for the movies. Fitzgerald’s illusions were not very different from
Gatsby’s, but his illusionless book resists destruction even from the most aggressive and
powerful despoilers. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker
since 1998.