An uninspired version of Fitzgerald's classic

Rating: 4/10 (15 January 2015)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel aptly named The Great Gatsby has been often recognized as the greatest American novel. It took me a year to finally get around to seeing it's film counterpart, and I was immensely disappointed. Whether you love the novel, hate it, or simply admire the way it captured the Jazz age, this movie has all of about nothing to offer you. The movie, to sum up, seems to spend more of its budget and attention on the senses, specifically sight and sound, than profound storytelling. For example, New York has become a brightly colored, CGI party, with colors bursting off of the screen similar to Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge or many of Zach Snyder's comic book adaptations. This is all fine and good, (though it is a huge misrepresentation of the era, which was more of a cover for bad times to come in the thirties) the film ends up losing its focus. There are constant odd jumps in shots, almost always happening in the middle of a character's sentence, seeming to illustrate my point further. However all of this may have been acceptable were it not for the performances. Apart from Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays an excellent Gatsby, everyone's dialogue and performance feels overdone. This is especially true of Maguire, who plays an alcoholic who gives unbearable monologues that sound, well as bad as they were in Raimi's Spider-Man films. In other words, he talks in a disinterested grumble through half the movie and makes random pauses that even Calculon would detest. Apart from these two, the other characters feel generic and boring, a mere shadow to those presented in Fitzgerald's third novel. The ending is quite foreboding, if nothing different for those who have read the novel, but it makes several characters bitterly unlikeable, a problem I had with the source material as well. The ending is tragic, the visuals are fantastic, but the film has too little an attention span and too poor performances to make this movie recommendable.