The Great Luhrmann

Rating: 9/10 (6 June 2013)

Scott Fitzgerald is credited with inventing the term "The Jazz Age" to describe the 1920s, and is often regarded as the greatest chronicler of that age in fiction. Today the "Roaring Twenties" are often regarded as a brief, prosperous, carefree and hedonistic interval between the war- torn 1910s and the economically depressed 1930s, the age of jazz, of cocktails, of flappers and of the Charleston. Like all attempts to summarise a whole decade in a single phrase, however, this can never be more than a half-truth. This was certainly a time of relative prosperity in the United States), but the decade was also haunted by memories of the Great War and its attendant bloodshed and by a sense of foreboding about the future. The era's much-vaunted hedonism can be seen as the reaction of a largely urban, well-to-do minority against the Puritanism of the not-so-silent majority; it was, after all, the decade of Prohibition.
Fitzgerald's best-known novel "The Great Gatsby" has been filmed a number of times, but the only other version I have seen (and that many years ago) was that from 1974 with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I won't set out the plot at any length, partly for reasons of space and partly because it is so well-known. The story takes place during the summer of 1922, in New York and on Long Island, and revolves around the web of relationships between the mysterious, self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, his friend Nick Carraway, Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan, her aristocratic husband Tom and Tom's mistress Myrtle. Daisy is Gatsby's former girlfriend; the two were at one time very much in love, even though she ended up marrying Buchanan instead. For all his wealth, Gatsby is a melancholy figure, and the reason is partly disillusionment with his opulent lifestyle and partly nostalgia for the time when he and Daisy were in love. His melancholy is heightened by his realisation that Daisy's marriage has been a failure and that in breaking his heart she has also broken her own. He becomes obsessed with undoing the past and winning her back so they can start again afresh.
Some Americans would claim that theirs is a classless, or at least a meritocratic, society, but Fitzgerald shows that America also has its forms of class distinction, perhaps more subtle than European ones but no less real. Gatsby falsely claims to come from a wealthy Midwestern family; in a society which maintains a sharp old-money/new-money distinction he has no wish to be regarded as a parvenu. Even so, he makes his home in the "new-money" enclave of West Egg, the neighbouring village of East Egg being the preserve of traditional "old-money" families like the Buchanans. In the film this distinction is also shown in the differences between Gatsby's home and Tom's. Both have huge, luxurious mansions, but Gatsby's is built in an exuberant Victorian Gothic and decorated inside in the Art Deco style, whereas the Buchanan home is built, inside and out, in a chaste American Classical idiom. A third decorative style, Arts-and-Crafts, is used for Nick's modest cottage.
This film confirmed my view that Leonardo DiCaprio, after a rather shaky start to his career during his heart-throb period in the nineties, has matured into a very fine actor. Gatsby is a complex character, glamorous and self-assured on the surface but emotional and vulnerable beneath, and DiCaprio does an excellent job at bringing out both sides of his character. Other impressive performances came from Carey Mulligan as Daisy, confirming the promise she showed in another period drama, "An Education", from Tobey Maguire as Nick, showing that there is more to him than "Spiderman", and from Joel Edgerton, an actor I had not come across before, as the snobbish, arrogant and bullying Tom. I was less impressed by Isla Fisher's Myrtle, played more as a sluttish flapper than as a working-class housewife. Certainly, Myrtle should be attractive- a man like Tom would not have looked at her had she been plain- but more demure than she is played here. It is an important plot point that her husband George is only just beginning to suspect her infidelity; had she behaved like Fisher does here he would have been wise to her long ago. The Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan also seemed miscast as Meyer Wolfsheim
The film was directed by Baz Luhrmann who has not always been my favourite director; earlier in his career he was responsible for a rather eccentric version of "Romeo and Juliet", also starring DiCaprio, and the ghastly "Moulin Rouge". He did, however, also make that fine film "Australia", essentially a traditional epic Western transferred to the Southern Hemisphere, but "The Great Gatsby" must rate as his best effort yet. Like its main character, Fitzgerald's novel has two sides. On the one hand it is a chronicle of excess, a record of New York high society during a particularly flamboyant period; on the other it is an intimate, timeless love-story. Luhrmann clearly understood this dichotomy at the heart of the novel, because both these elements are present in his film. Visually its portrayal of the opulent lifestyles of the ultra-rich and of Gatsby's riotous parties is magnificent. Luhrmann's use of Art Deco styling may be slightly anachronistic in a film set in 1922- the style was more associated with the late twenties and thirties- but it fits in well with the general mood of the film. There is a sharp contrast between these scenes and those set in the "Valley of Ashes", the run-down industrial area where Myrtle and George live. Unlike the directors of some visually splendid films, however, Luhrmann never loses sight of the need to tell a human story, and succeeds in conveying the full emotional power of Fitzgerald's great novel. 9/10