An artful film where artifice replaces emotion, highly refined stuff

Rating: 7/10 (15 October 2013)

The Great Gatsby (2013)
Unlike both "Moulin Rouge" and "Romeo & Juliet," two amazing movies with literary roots, Baz Luhrman's "The Great Gatsby" does not quite let go of reality. The effects and the general visual license throughout are in service to a very literal love story, which rules the movie.
This might be what is best, but it means there is no release into this other world of Luhrman's fancy, which is the real joy (and astonishment) of the other two movies. Instead there is an utterly crystalline attention to light and detail. And to scenes that are themselves over the top and are merely filmed with ordinary brilliance. This is Luhrmann the stage director set loose, and for theatrical excess some of the party scenes are pretty wonderful, recalling (for some reason) the crazy party scenes in DeMille's "Madame Satan" (shot back in 1930). But then, DeMille and Luhrmann are both about spectacle.
I'm not sure the story, which is the heart of this, survives it all. The plastic falseness of the approach (the color and light and camera as well as the sets themselves) gets in the way of the drama, the very human and very 1920s American drama. Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent, though not what I'd call transcendent, which is unfortunately what the role needs. Jay Gatsby is nothing if not a mysterious and highly idealistic man caught up in old fashioned ways. His sidekick and narrator is played by Tobey Maguire, and I usually like him a lot but here he is so detached from the action, as if playing the narrator physically, he ends up adding to the plasticity rather than the human depths of the story.
Third in line is certainly the woman who has Gatsby's attention (and obsession), played by Carrie Mulligan with some deliberate force. She, also, is very good but falls into the idea of the story more than the emotional expression of it. Some of the more minor characters add to this general array of true "characters" as if they are types, or as if they are actors playing roles.
In fact, this intentional stylizing of every part into a kind of presentation of ideas, told with visual fireworks, is the point. For some people it might sit perfectly on the cusp of art film and naturalistic drama. If things got pushed into even further stylizing we'd have a piece of art on our hands, and it might have a smaller but more fervid audience. I think it might have tipped further to an old school Hollywood drama with characters who rip your heart out and close-ups that make you weep. That, however, is not possible with so much artifice center stage.
So we have an ambitious, beautiful, curious movie. I wish Luhrmann could say, aloud, what he felt he didn't quite get the way he wanted. He has admitted that filming the movie was no fun at all, and I can imagine the work and attention to detail it would require. It's worth seeing if you like movie-making, or like Luhrmann's other movies.