FILM: The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann is an interesting director, whose films I’ve found to be reliably enjoyable. His theatrical and dramatic style is unique and interesting, if nothing else, and in particular his rendition of Romeo and Juliet was masterfully executed. He returns to the cinema with The Great Gatsby, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name, which I can’t say I would have been that interested in if it weren’t for Luhrmann’s name. As usual, I haven’t read the book before the film - although I probably could have given the book is fairly short - so I will be judging the film on its own merits.

It strikes me as fairly cruel to cast Tobey Maguire alongside someone like Leonardo DiCaprio. Maguire is one of the most irritating actors I know, and his presence was only a detriment to the film, exacerbated by the presence of a great actor such as DiCaprio. He sounds like an amateur high school drama student, and his tone of voice grates as such, so every time he spoke it broke the immersion of the film. He doesn’t seem to know how to emote to the same degree as DiCaprio, and he appears to be stuck in the whiny and mopey Spiderman he played. I cannot fathom why anyone would think to cast these two actors opposite each other in the same movie.

But I digress. The Great Gatsby is a film about a man who comes to New York City in the early 1920s for career prospects, and meets an incredibly wealthy and mysterious man named Jay Gatsby. He gets caught up in Gatsby’s life and many complications ensue. This film starts off incredibly slow, with long-winded introductions to inconsequential characters, and you begin to wonder what the point of it all is. We don’t meet Gatsby himself until at least half an hour in, and it takes another half-hour for him to become interesting. Incidentally, Gatsby is the only compelling character in the film, with the rest being relatively uncomplicated and uninteresting. 

The problem with The Great Gatsby is that it is terribly unfocussed, and doesn’t seem to know what exactly its trying to be. For the most part, this film is just a big mess with a camera, and the rest is an attempt to sort out the results. It contains loud party scenes, extravagant dramatic scenes, darker introspective motifs, and a wide variety of characters, resulting in some truly bizarre and dramatic tone shifts. The contrast works quite well, but the central focus of this film is hard to pinpoint, and it comes across as inconsistent with its own aims.

As I said earlier, Gatsby is the only interesting character in the film, so its at its best when it focusses on his character development. I really like what was done with him in this film - he comes across as a deeply troubled and scarred man, which he tries to hide under a facade of wealth and partying, and as a result he is very compelling. The enigma and mystery surrounding him is quite intriguing, making us want to learn more and more about him, and why he acts as he does, as the story progresses. This film could be considered primarily a character study of Gatsby himself, and I enjoyed watching his character unravel gradually. It’s never exactly revealed what makes him so eccentric, obsessive and troubled, so the mystery prevails even after his death, which is a neat touch. It seems apparent to me that Gatsby is delusional, psychotic, and megalomaniacal to some extent, and the focus on his obsession with Daisy and his perfect life reminds me of an Aronofsky narrative, in a way.

It’s great when it focusses on Gatsby’s psyche, but unfortunately it puts far too much emphasis on other, less interesting characters and events, and too much effort and time has been put into the extravagant and theatrical execution. The film is far too busy and clogged with unnecessary flourish - the party scenes in particular - leaving the actual substance sparsely distributed. It tries to do too much and falls short in the storytelling aspect. This is Baz Luhrmann’s style, which I don’t typically have a problem with, but in this case there’s so much potential for a deeper exploration of Gatsby as a person which is missed in favour of the superficial theatrics. It falls down particularly because his film style works best with a film which is primarily comical, and relatively tongue-in-cheek -  however, there are some significant darker undertones in The Great Gatsby which don’t quite fit with the way it was executed.

I find the contrived nature of this film in particular to break the immersion in the story, a problem only exacerbated by Tobey Maguire’s acting. The characters move, speak and act in an unnatural way - again, an aspect of Luhrmann’s style - for the sake of preserving the theatrical style. It comes across as heavily pre-rehearsed, and therefore too surreal for the characters to come across as genuine or real in any way. This is a problem for a film which is at its strongest when focussing on characters, and there is so much missed potential to strip it down and focus on the serious drama and character arcs. I would have liked to have seen a more natural and organic drama focussing on the relationships between the characters - particularly Gatsby - but the superficial execution renders it particularly insubstantial.

I can’t criticise it too much, though, because it’s at least functional, and if nothing else it’s a fun film to see. Luhrmann’s scriptwriting is commendable for being both clever and entertaining in its own unique way. The Great Gatsby is little more than half a film, but it’s an entertaining half-film, for what it’s worth, and if that’s all it wanted to do then I suppose it succeeded. I must make one point, though: this film lost me near the end with the dropping of the word “destiny”. Destiny is an incredibly weak plot device, and shows both solipsism and a complete lack of perspective on the part of the story as a whole, which seriously damages how seriously I can take it. It makes events out to be far more important than they conceivably are, in an attempt to raise the stakes, but it’s so insincere it does the complete opposite.

That aside, I mildly enjoyed The Great Gatsby. It’s not particularly well executed, but it’s not too bad either, and probably worth seeing if only to see what all the fuss is about.