The Great Gatsby 2013

They always say “read the book first” but sometimes it is fascinating watching a film version without any knowledge of the text it is based on. Book fans can get quite agitated at seeing their vision or interpretation of the book trampled on in some way but at the same time if the film doesn’t capture the essence of the book in some way, then what’s the point ? Looking at this purely as a film, it is enjoyable to watch, but what is a little disappointing is Luhrmann seems to be trying to recapture much of what made Moulin Rouge so great and repeating himself, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. The fast paced editing, visual style, music and direction captures the decadence, glamour and excess of Gatsby’s world in much the same way, though equally this heightened anachronistic interpretation of the 1920s will no doubt delight or irritate in much the same way too. Both DiCaprio and Maguire are excellent as Gatsby and Carroway and the strongest moments of the film are their scenes together. Indeed, the exploration of the character of Gatsby himself, his motivations, hopes and backstory and importantly Carroway’s interpretation of him form much of what works well within the film and it was no surprise to learn that these two were cast well before others. Luhrmann evokes a great sense of mystery and intrigue over Gatsby's character initially, gradually revealing elements over the course of the film and DiCaprio's presence and charisma serve the character well. The overarching narration that served Moulin Rouge so well is also present, however here it feels heavy handed and ultimately unnecessary (despite some clever visual trickery with words from the book), with Luhrmann seemingly unwilling to let the audience take their own interpretation of the story from what is presented. Furthermore, whilst Mulligan is fine as the central female character, it is difficult to care about her other than through Gatsby’s motivation and Edgerton’s performance veers towards pantomime on occasion, another stylistic conceit seemingly lifted from Moulin Rouge. These two characters may well serve to underline one of the film’s themes at the end but it makes it very difficult to accept Gatsby’s motivation other than through DiCaprio’s admittedly great performance. A partial return to form then for Luhrmann after Australia, but not wholly successful either.

I'll preface this by saying that I've never read the book that this movie is based on. So I won't say anything about how faithful of an adaptation this is, but rather on the movie itself.

Leonardo Di Caprio is, as always, marvelous. That's certainly no news, but I really enjoyed his performance. He was so good that I felt he basically obscured everyone else, except maybe Edgerton.
That's one of my first critic of the movie, the cast was not on par with DiCaprio and it showed.

I liked the cinematography, especially during the parties at Gatsby's manor. They really felt like the roaring twenties. Great work by the costume team, they really captured the esthetic of the 1920's upper society.

I felt that the movie was directed well, but the CGI was mediocre at best. I really got a fake feeling; I don't know if that was the intention, but it didn't work for me.

As for the story, I found it quite predictable and to be honest, rather boring. This is obviously a personal preference, but I wish they had dived deeper in the obsession of Gatsby, instead of romanticizing it. As it stands, I found it really hard to care about the story of any one of the characters. Again, I don't know if it's by choice, maybe it's the same in the original work, but for me it rendered the movie boring.
One thing that I liked was the approach to the narration, with Nick (portrayed by Maguire) narrating the story, with lines, I assume, taken from the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The soundtrack was a bit of a hit and miss. Using modern, rearranged music and songs was a bold move, which only paid off about half the time. Other times it just felt jarring and out of place.

In the end, this is a movie worth seeing because of DiCaprio's performance, in my opinion. If you're a fan of his, you'll definitely enjoy The Great Gatsby. Otherwise, I'd say skip it.

6/10

The Great Gatsby tells a lot of stories and gains more themes so on. This new adaptation takes a different direction and unique scale. The experience feels familiar to other Baz Luhrmann film, which means it's quite dazzling by his fabulous style and creating an over-whimsical version of the setting. The easiest thing to say is it's fun as a Baz Luhrmann film, but it kind of glosses over the story too much. While it's generally stunning, it didn't dig deeper within the context. The Great Gatsby is fascinating enough but it could have been much grander than what it was shown on screen. The film did follow the book, it takes a lot of time exploring its setting, characters, and conflict, but explores only little on what's beneath it. The Great Gatsby actually has something more than just romance, but the film's storyline ambition mostly lies in there. The film mostly glosses at the points that suppose to provide more depth to the story which makes the possible satires of the period feels missing. But the film still has plenty of life. Beginning with the performances, Leonardo DiCaprio is definitely the kind of actor who can perfectly play the role and he did standout to be the better Gatsby than anyone else who portrayed the role. Tobey Maguire did what he usually do in movie but he is fine enough as Nick Carraway, same goes to Carey Mulligan as Daisy. Joel Edgerton steals all of his scenes by his intense performance as Tom Buchanan. The direction is spectacular however. Baz Luhrmann still perfectly uses his own style to tell the story. There are many extravagantly magnificent sequences, especially the party scenes that works amazingly even in 3D. The style really shows how ambitious this film will be and it transcends the scale which makes it wholly an interesting cinematic ride. Around with visual pleasures, there's the soundtrack and music score also keeping things groovy. It's hard to deny how enjoyable the experience is, but it could have also taken a higher perspective to the actual story. To be much fair, it did a remarkable job bringing it to the screen in a spectacular way with a cast who are very enthusiastic. While the visuals flare endlessly, the storytelling makes the overall film gripping. It's somewhat disappointing how some of its morality was left as a background even though people will say it's not necessary to take it seriously, but everyone has their own aspect on reading the book. The Great Gatsby is not as satisfying as it deserves but it manages to be incredibly eye candy and thoroughly entertaining.

[3.8/10] There is a scene, fairly early on in The Great Gatsby, director Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, that tells you everything you need to know about the film. The film’s bystander protagonist is reflecting on his time with the title character, describing Gatsby standing at the end of his dock, looking at what lay on the other side of the bay, as though he were reaching out for something there. And god help us, the film goes on to depict this, with not only the novel’s trademark green light piercing through some obviously CGI’d scenery, but with Gatsby himself literally reaching, hand outstretched, toward it. No, this isn’t a spiritual reach, an internal feeling put to words; it’s just Nick Carraway describing this weird thing he saw one time.

Such is the way of this ham-fisted, overly-literal, big, loud, and dumb adaptation of such a seminal work of fiction. There is no point too subtle that it can’t be screamed in the audience’s faces. There is no story beat too nuanced that it can’t be explicated to death in voice-over. And there is no theme, no whit of Fitzgerald’s dialogue, so ineffable or metaphorical that I cannot be made into some painfully obvious visual representation that shows all the imagination and depth of a children’s book trying to illustrate that “A is for Apple.”

Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby is, if not an insult, than at least a severe dumbing down of its source material, which is flattened and painted over in antiseptic computer-generated splendor to create an overly constructed, empty shell of a popcorn flick masquerading as art. Contrary to from whence it came, there is no soul or truth in this version of Gatsby only the vacuous echoes of a CliffsNotes understanding off this story and its ideas rendered through a series of music videos.

What good can be said about this mid-2010s monstrosity is that it captures the sense of exhausting excess baked into the story in a modern fashion. The movie’s opening third or so is a spastic sprint through lurid image after lurid image, with Jay-Z and other modern artists piped in liberally, and no chance for the audience to catch its breath in the midst of this splendiferous assault.

This presentation is done, like the rest of the film, with plenty of obvious signposting and one-dimensional introductions and “don’t do this cool thing” indulgence (of the same stripe that would impact star Leonardo DiCaprio’s spiritual cousin The Wolf of Wall Street. It is anything but faithful to the times or to its source material on this account. But it is, perhaps, faithful to the spirit of them, using its larger than life bent to convey the conspicuous and enervating excess of Gatsby’s shindigs and the general consequence-free extravagance that ensconces the story’s central characters.

It’s hard to call all this great exactly, but it gets at the tone of this high living in terms, in terms that a modern audience can understand.

Unfortunately, it appears that’s the only setting Luhrmann has in the film. The only instances when the film feels alive are when it’s trying to overwhelm you with spectacle and style. At some point, Luhrmann has to attempt to draw the picture back into something approaching real human feeling, and ends up feeling as shallow as Jay Gatsby’s ominously-referred-to pool.

The movie reduces Fitzgerald’s tale of obsession, class, and the floundering American dream to a soapy melodrama. The ideas of status, of different social strata and the limitations therein, are suffused to the background of a movie more interested in who’s schtupping whom behind who’s back and the high drama when it all blows up.

Sure, there’s potency in the other worldly imagery Lurman uses, of impossibly verdant West Egg, grimey New York City, and the coal-black no man’s’ land in between to signify some of the book’s takes on classism, and even Luhrmann can’t fully sidestep the bitter irony of which groups, which people, are forced to bear the consequences of those excesses and who has the freedom to leave them behind. But his Great Gatsby is far less interested in those things than it is in dazzling you and blaring its person-to-person snarls in your face as loudly as possible.

That translates to the acting in the film. In keeping with the visual style, nothing in the performances is natural. Tobey Maguire in particular is as affected and unbelievable as an actual human being having experiences that he comes off like an android sent to the 1920s to study human behavior and recite classic literature like it’s his final project in high school theater. In fairness, this appears largely to be a choice in the film throughout, with everyone going for outsized deliveries and brash, boisterous emotions and indications from stem to stern.

There is but one brief stretch of the film, where the film’s would-be romantic partners are reunited, and the film loses itself in the genuinely affecting notions of lost love and time that can be never gotten back. It’s in these brief moments, most of them terse by the film’s babbling standards, that Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio shine through the rubble of this ill-conceived adaptation and manage to convey more than an ounce of the feeling and complicated ideas and emotions at play in tragic tones. But it’s a short time until The Great Gatsby is back to wagging its maximalist bent in your face and leaving every figure in the film seeming as though they’re just playacting.

Luhrmann does try to preserve the prose, relying on voice over to maintain some modicum of Fitzgerald’s verbal ethos in the picture if he can capture nothing else. But even there, the words are literally superimposed on the screen, replete with conspicuous and corny title drops, or mangled into stilted monologues that poor Maguire just cannot spit out within the confines of his tortured frame story.

The Great Gatsby is an utterly dead film trying to pretend that it’s full of life. For every point Luhrmann wants to make, his solution is to smash the viewer in the face with a sledgehammer, with each strike punctuated by a thumping pop interpretation of an earlier industrial, and the mallet covered in glitter and gold monogrammed confetti. It is less an adaptation of a Great American Novel than a self-important perfume commercial dripping with pretense and commoditized flair. Stay away. In Luhrmann's hands, the roar of the twenties, and all the hidden cries that Fitzgerald tried to isolate within that din, are reduced to a whimper.