You're an Absolute Beginner...

Rating: 5/10 (9 June 2013)

So imagine it's 1967 if you'd missed out on all the hoo-ha over Bond, but you read Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and found you quite enjoyed it... and what's this? There's a big screen version of Casino Royale hitting the cinemas, with David Niven, Orson Welles and Ursula Andress. Better check it out, right? Well this version of Great Gatsby is as close to F Scott Fitzgerald's novel in tone as that psychedelic romp starring Niven, Welles, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen was to Fleming's dour Cold War novel. Or, if you prefer, as close as the mid-1980s Absolute Beginners musical was to the classic novel about Soho coffee houses of the 1950s.
Which is not to say this film jettison's the novel's plot, not at all, if anything it's too faithful. Scenes are shoehorned in because they were in the novel, but for no real reason. When Nick and Jordan meet the old buffer in Gatsby's library, well in the book it means something, but in the film it serves no real purpose I can see.
As with the other two movies I've mentioned, the songs help save it and it does have its moments. The melancholy scenes work better than all the frenzied upbeat stuff, but this film is really about taking a dayglo spray paint to an ornate statue. You know the director has failed when you have Tobey Maguire just talking the whole frickin' time, explaining what people are thinking and doing and their motivations. Don't tell, show, is one lesson Fitzgerald would have been taught when he tried out as a screenwriter in the 1930s. It doesn't help that narrator should be made stronger, not weaker, otherwise what is he doing there? When he's a first person narrative in a book, his raison d'etre is solid, but in a film the lead actor (arguably I know) should have something more to do, otherwise why not just have the director tell the story? I give this 5 out of 10 because the 3D visuals are out of this world and make this a real experience, albeit not always an enjoyable one, but it IS different, probably the same way that the 67 Casino Royale was in its day. It's mad. But the director misses the poetry and poignancy, the subtlety of the book, and probably isn't even aiming for that anyhow.