A Glitzier Gatsby.

Rating: 6/10 (19 March 2014)

It's time to start wondering if they ought to leave great or even near-great novels alone. No matter how hard they try, they simply can't capture "Lolita" on the screen, or "The Great Gatsby." Joseph Strick once took a stab at "Ulysses." You ought to see it.
I had to read "The Great Gatsby" in high school and didn't get much out of it. It was an ordinary love story and rather boring. I preferred Jack London and Stephen Crane. But I was much younger then and my brain was smaller, unable to encompass the theme of lost and broken promise.
Paramount turned out a version of the story with Alan Ladd as a rich guy, but it was all lovey-dovey until the murder at the end. A handsome Robert Redford and a wan Mia Farrow took a stab at it in 1975, probably the most nearly successful attempt.
But a generation has passed and it's time for another crack at it. The director, Baz Luhrmann, apparently believes that the previous versions were too slow and colorless, didn't have enough violence, and had no access to computer generated images. Boy, does he believe it.
The camera whooshes all over the place. There are Busby Berkeley shots from overhead. It caroms off the walls of New York City streets. It's fast. And the sound track is loud. Some of the musical score -- whether source music or overscore, and sometimes it's impossible to tell one from another -- are of the period. During Gatsby's increasingly public courting of Daisy, "Ain't Misbehaving" slides into "Let's Misbehave." But that kind of musical echo is uncommon. It's 1926 and the bands play rap music while the camera takes a tour of Times Square. Later there is a disco dance scene with the appropriate beats. The bands never seem to shut up. It's pretty jarring, whereas the Redford version, though sluggish in comparison, at least stuck to lush period tunes like "What'll I Do?".
Carey Mulligan, as Daisy, doesn't look bewitching but that's okay. She handles the part well, and after all the point isn't that Daisy is such a terrific knockout. It's that she's got some men in her thrall, mostly through her appealing delicacy and whatever pheromones she's flinging around.
Hers is probably the best example of casting and acting. Tobey Maguire is the narrator and observer, Nick. (Quick -- name a seed you put in the garage! Sorry. I had to get that in. It's from a crossword puzzle in the London Times, invented by a sadist. The answer is "Caraway", a homonym for Nick's last name.)
Poor Maguire. He does what he can with the part but is awfully miscast. Let's face it. Maguire wasn't born to play Nick Carraway. He takes a leap at the role but winds up as Mister Peepers. His occasional narration is given in a weary croak. The writers have sent him to a psychiatric institution after the storm of crap he's been through. He does get to quote some of the more impressive lines of the novel. ("Blue gardens," etc.) Tom Buchanan, Joel Edgerton, looks brutal enough, more than Bruce Dern did. He's more physical and just as dumb. But Dern could have passed for a Yale man, whereas Edgerton looks like he was a feral child raised by wolves.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives it everything he has, maybe too much. The director must have egged him on. He uses the same intonations he did in "J. Edgar." He'd have probably been better off with a phony English accent to go along with the rest of his fictional history. And if Fitzgerald's Gatsby is nervous when he meets Daisy in that rosy picture-postcard cottage, DiCaprio is a complete neural shambles, drenched with sweat, knocking over furniture. It gets the point across at least as well as a crowbar across the head.
Most of all, what's missing from all of these adaptations is Fitzgerald's sly humor. When Daisy and Tom first come to one of Gatsby's soirées, Fitzgerald gives all of the guests the names of obscure animals, all in a long list. ("The Wildebeests from Cincinnati, the Dik-Diks, Professor Margay of Dartmouth, the Elands of Hollywood fame," and so forth. Those aren't direct quotes.)
The movie is a long and glorious pageant of color that almost swamps Gatsby. Maybe next time.