may be a mess in part, but in other parts is faithful in tone and spirit to Fitzgerald with excellent performances

Rating: 7/10 (18 October 2015)

I was reminded of this latest adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's seminal work on wealth and identity in the early (and beyond) 20th century. Baz Lurhmann directed it; it's hard not to tell, and especially if you've seen Moulin Rouge you know how he will take this time period (like Shakespeare and just uh, musical Paris in 1900) and make it into a fiasco and fresco of images. It's hard not to when dealing with the high-frenzied party world of the early 1920s in the Jazz age, when people with money had a lot of the (illegal but who cares) hootch, and a person like Jay Gatsby could make a name for himself as... whatever he wanted. Of course, he was a bootlegger in this story, but that's if you look at what he technically does. He's much more in the eyes of Nick (Tobey Maguire, with DiCaprio as Gatsby): he's mythical, and charming and rich, and then... other times completely out of control and unable to really connect with what to do with himself, especially when it comes to his long lost love (Daisy, Carey Mulligan is really great in just that way of being delicate but smart).
The frenetic style is not unexpected for these early party scenes, but they can get so crazed that I grew weary of the anachronistic use of the music; for some reason in Moulin Rouge this worked a little better since it seemed all a delirious fantasy about LOVE (in capital letters) with only a vague sense of the place and time. In Gatsby it's clearly this period - oddly enough DiCaprio appeared before this in Django Unchained, another film by a director who revels in music from today in a period setting, but there it was done very much with a wink and a grin, a audacious black comedy. But here it's a dark drama at heart about the failure of the American dream in the midst of being able to achieve it initially: become whoever you want to be, reinvent yourself, and it can be great. Or, if it spins off the wheels, not so much.
There is conventional stuff that can't be avoided if really delivering Fitzgerald's story, which includes how Daisy is already with Tom, played by a very great Joel Edgerton, especially in how he gets angrier and more intense in a particular argument scene that is, for me, the real centerpiece of the film. But for this second half of the film, when Luhrmann gives us less of the full-blown, Jay-Z soundtracked spectacle, we get the story of this love-that-cannot-be, and with scenes that vary between tender admission (the "you can't repeat the past" dialog between Gatsby and Nick), the awkward reuniting of Jay and Daisy, and that giant argument scene. This and other stuff IS faithful to the book, and the actors help sell it so much even with (or despite) the Luhrmann over-flourishing.
But maybe this material in 2013 could only be made (or sold) as this frenetic spectacle. And you do get that, and it is so much it becomes too much. And maybe that's the point and I just didn't get it or respond to it. But The Great Gatsby is still a good movie because the story at heart is so incredible and deep and you can read so much into how characters who lose sight of what they want, or know what they want and muck up getting it - and it's all under that watchful 'eye' of the billboard en route to Long Island from New York city - that it breaks your heart. When it goes for it, this cast (DiCaprio gives it his all, which could have been funny in the wrong hands; Maguire is just the solid core, as he should be in this story, constantly watching and as the audience's eyes) sells it excellently. I'd watch it again, and is a good adaptation if not a great one of a book that lives up to the hype.