a larger than life spectacle brought down by the horribly miscast Mulligan

Rating: 8/10 (11 May 2013)

To avoid dwelling on the negatives, there's many things that this adaptation gets right:
1) The colorful, self-indulgent grandeur of the sets captures the rich, heady and claustrophobic world that Fitzgerald created in his book to perfection. The noise , the migraine inducing lighting, the bizarre contrast of an old era against modern music, all of these all serve their purpose well. They overwhelm us and this pulls us into the shallow but beautiful escapism of the hedonistic post-war years
2) Performance wise, I actually thought Tobey Maguire fit the character of Nick really well. His glazed, childish almost foolishly lost look which could grate your nerves in other movies works well for this character. He looks truly lost in this world and you believe that he would be the lamb to the wolf like world around him.
Leonardo IS Gatsby! I'm an ardent fan of the original book and a literary enthusiast in general; very rarely am I satisfied with how a novel character translates to screen but Leo plays him with a perfect amount of passion, distilled intensity and bottled rage at a world he can't fit into nor escape. Through his eyes and disturbed body language you truly feel Gatsby's alienation and helplessness in Daisy's love. The sense of maddening happiness tinged with an inevitable unhappy ending is hard to convey with facial expression, but Leo manages it to a tee. A treat to watch!
The rest of the actors, such as Tom and Jordan and Myrtle are all equally apt, though they don't have as much scope as the leads to perform .
Now to the biggest flaw in the film: Carey Mulligan's Daisy made me want to pull my hair out I'm frustration! Now by no means was Daisy an especially likable character in the book; indeed she was largely a symbol of the shallow and self serving glitter glamour of that era, where love could be discarded as easily as cheap perfume if it became inconvenient. Nevertheless, you can still sympathize with Daisy's confusion if not her actions. Mulligan does not convey the subtleties of Daisy's character at all. Her Daisy is childish, self-conscious and at best she looks vaguely interested in Gatsby. The sense that Daisy was in many ways a victim of this hedonistic world is entirely lost in Mulligans conception. She elicits little sympathy, her romantic dialogue delivery lacks even a fraction of the passion of Gatsby...and it truly ruins the whole equation because she does not seem to be a viable object of such an intense passion. Its like a little girl was given old time costumes and got lost in figuring out what or who her character is. Mulligan is not horrible but just as Leo makes Gatsby come alive, Mulligan makes Daisy even more repugnant than she was in the original story. Even Amitabh Bacchan in a minute cameo as Meyer Wolfsheim makes more impact than her. A sad factor in a movie that otherwise was a truly sincere effort at bringing Fitzgerald's work to fruition.