Review of The Great Gatsby (2013) by Jennetp — 14 May 2013

I wish “The Great Gatsby” had opted to be either much more faithful or much less faithful to Fitzgerald's novel. As it was, the film’s fidelity, especially early on, made its ultimate departures dismaying--at least to this lover of both Fitzgerald's writing and Luhrmann's films.

It was as though the director was perfectly happy to party with the novelist but didn’t want to endure the brutal clarity of his hangover. The worst offenders, for me, were the kinder, gentler Daisy and Tom.

In the novel, though superficially charming, they are, at heart, cruel, greedy and self-obsessed; in the film, they are flawed but relatively sympathetic. And, to make that work, Luhrman makes Gatsby less sympathetic--and he makes Nick’s admiration for Gatsby deeply suspect.

During the final showdown at the Plaza Hotel, for example, Luhrmann's Gatsby becomes physically violent, alarming Daisy, who then decides to leave him. In the novel, Gatsby's violence is limited to a fleeting facial expression, and Daisy's terror has multiple causes, not least the intrusion of real passions into her elaborate social game.

In the film, right after Myrtle is killed, Tom points her vengeful husband at Gatsby, as the driver of the "death car." Perfectly understandable: Gatsby normally drives the car, and Tom is distraught over the death of his lover.

In the novel, however, Tom fingers Gatsby the following day, AFTER learning that Gatsby is innocent and his own wife the killer. That's a whole 'nother level of depravity, and, for me, it's much more interesting than "he did it because he was grieving," a tired motive that appears on TV at least a hundred times per week.

So what does Luhrman achieve by making Fitzgerald's characters more familiar and formulaic while preserving so much of Fitzgerald's language and plot? For one thing, he backs away from the idea that vast, unearned wealth can be corrupting, as can vast differences between the “haves” and the “have nots.

” Moreover, from the moment he introduces Nick as a mental patient, he decides for us that Gatsby was more deluded fool than idealist, whereas Fitzgerald was careful to keep the two possibilities balanced.

These, for me, are losses. While I have no problem with plot or character changes, generally--I loved Luhrmann’s tweaking of “Romeo and Juliet,” for instance--there has to be a payoff, and I don’t see one here, unless you count instant recognition as a virtue, which, I suppose, billions of McDonald’s customers do.

Finally, a word about the film's music. When I heard Filter’s “Happy Together” in a preview, I got excited. After the mostly edgeless tunes and sappy baladeering of “Moulin Rouge,” I was ready for some thrilling music to accompany Luhrmann’s thrilling visuals.

But thrills turned out to be in short supply. I liked Jay Z’s “$100 Bill” for the speakeasy scene, which was appropriately urban and decadent, but some of the other hip-hop tunes clashed badly with the anti-urban milieu of the Hamptons.

The most egregious misfire, however, was Lana Del Ray’s “Young and Beautiful” as the theme song of Gatsby and Daisy’s renewed love. “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” asks the song, over and over, a question utterly irrelevant to the reunion, after five years, of a man cherishing a beautiful illusion and a woman seeking diversion.

I can only conclude that Luhrmann and his music director, Anton Monsted, think audiences don’t listen to song lyrics. I also question Monsted’s taste (he did “Moulin Rouge,” too), which I find too reliant on what is--or has been--at the top of the charts.

He strikes me as a man who listens to popular radio and little else, making most of his musical choices obvious, boring, and ill-suited to their dramatic contexts. I’ve heard much better music on TV shows such as “The Sopranos,” “Life,” and “Sons of Anarchy,” and I wish Luhrmann would hire one of their music supervisors (or me) for his next film.