The Great Gatsby...... The Great

Rating: 7/10 (7 June 2013)

Just saw Baz Luhrmann's "Great Gatsby". ((note: for a fun drinking game, take a shot every time I mention Moulin Rouge)) Thought I might just throw out a review for the heck of it. First things first, it isn't perfect--though, if you expected it to be, you were expecting too much of an adaptation of a book. The script came down with a bad case of "Titanic Syndrome" ((those with angst about the liberal use of the words "Rose" and "Jack" in that film will know what I'm talking about)), to the point that if I hear someone called "Old Sport" again, someone is going to get punched. For the record, Harry Potter has a lot of the same problem with the script... it's almost like the writer forgot that this was going to be filmed (allowing us to see who is being addressed) and seen in one sitting (so we know that the person called "old sport" in shot 4A is the same person in shot 12B). Apart from that small shortcoming in the script, the acting was pretty good and the action was well paced.
Now, the real reason for seeing a Baz Luhrmann film... the cinematography. The film strikes a near-perfect blend of not taking itself too seriously and heavy inter-personal drama. Like the three previous full-scale productions Luhrmann has done (Australia, Moulin Rouge, and Romeo + Juliet), the main reason for seeing this film is the impeccably creative way in which the story is told. If you've seen Moulin Rouge, you may get a little distracted in the use of the "in scene narrator" and semi-first-person storytelling as it feels all too familiar to the previous project... but the stories are so radically different in both setting and content that that can be pretty quickly tossed aside. There is some pretty sick animation work done too (for example, during a snow storm towards the end of the film, instead of snowflakes, it is falling and rotating letters which forms the words of the narration on the screen) that all is done for great effect to never let the viewer forget that they are hearing a story that is being typed. This is what allows for the already-mentioned similarity to Moulin Rouge... and the rockstar persona that comes with it.
For some reason, when you make clear that the story you are seeing is taking place in context to a story being told within the film (ie, the "main character" of the actual film is telling the story you are watching to other people), it allows for a lot more bending of the rules of reality. Moulin Rouge and 300 would be the clearest examples of this--though there are certainly others. Because the rules of the road can be ignored somewhat, Baz Luhrmann feels quite comfortable setting a party scene in the 1920's Empire architecture with 2012 hip hop and then dares the audience to question it (like Moulin Rouge). The weird part is that it works. I don't know if it is the combination of the bombastic characters, the semi-over-colored sets or the core animation/camera work, but for some reason the blend of JayZ production capabilities with the "flapper/speakeasy/gangster" vibe fits in the 1920's atmosphere almost seamlessly... probably because this is the kind of music you would expect to hear there if they had it.
For the real crowning moment, however, we find another of Luhrmann's recent favorites... a film with no good guys. Like Moulin Rouge, Gatsby centers on a protagonist who isn't the main character--yet whose main role is to narrate the film and hold all the various story elements together. Also, like Moulin Rouge, the narrator is a washed up writer that the world has chewed up and spit back out that is writing/narrating the story as a way to get it off their chest. Because of this, like in Moulin Rouge, pretty much everybody involved turns out to be a shmuck. There's the girl that makes you groan, the guy you want to deck at every opportunity, the love story with a bad ending and a couple rowdy and colorful party scenes in the middle. Though, I will say, watching this movie did make me wish I was a bond salesman in New York during the 1920's...... I wish I could get paid for doing that little work in a week.
Final thought: Lots of eyecandy, sterling camera work, underpaid animators, good actors, good-but-not-great script. They told the story of Great Gatsby mostly as I remember it from the book.