The roaring twenties

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2017)

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is an extravagant anachronistic stage bound spectacle that is glorious in 3D. It is loud, noisy and brash just like one of Jay Gatsby's weekend parties.
F Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel is given a modernist twist but the moral centre remains as represented by Nick Carraway's (Tobey McGuire) narration whom unfolds the story of the vile people around him with only Gatsby having some decency left.
The tale is of the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) who have moved to be near his old flame Daisy (Carey Mulligan) in 1920s New York. Jay was once a poor boy who went off to fight in the Great War. He is now wealthy and made up tales about himself. Is he from a wealthy family, an Oxford man or a bootlegger? He throws parties to get near to Daisy, rekindle his lost love and he brings Nick to the fold because he is Daisy's cousin.
Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) a vile man who cheats on his wife, he brags, he lies and has crackpot theories of the superiority of the white man. He also has money of the old kind, inherited.
There is an interesting cameo from Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's ally who has human molars as a tie pin and who never accurately gives the impression that Gatsby could be a gentleman.
Maybe DiCaprio overdoes the 'Old Sport' line and is in some ways is less aloof than Robert Redford from the 1974 version. However Redford's reticence gave his Gatsby a mystical quality that DiCaprio could not quiet capture here.