When Jazz Was New And Frightening

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2013)

This was a much better movie than the misleadingly cut trailer made it out to be. Luhrman avoided the temptation of being taken in by the glitz. The parties -- both Tom's little mud wallow with Myrtle and Gatsby's extravaganzas -- are as chaotic, as crass and as hollow as they should be. The anachronistic music make emotional sense where its used. DiCaprio is an excellent Gatsby -- a man visibly playing a part, watching himself play it, anxious about being found out, and urgently delusional about Daisy. Tobey Maguire plays Nick as a wide eyed naif from the Midwest, almost a bumpkin. Joel Edgerton is a very convincing Tom -- self assured, bullying, pedantic, proprietary, contemptuous of his inferiors, but far more intelligent than he first looks. He and DiCaprio really bring off the confrontation at the Plaza that is the story's climax. Carey Mulligan is an adequate Daisy, who is anyway mostly a projection of Gatsby's; she's petulant, bored, resentful of Tom's infidelities, ready for a fling with a lost girlhood love, but nothing more than that. Elizabeth Debicki is underused as a magnetic Jordan Baker, and Isla Fisher has great fun playing Myrtle Wilson as a working class floozy.
Luhrman has made some interesting changes of emphasis. Nick is much more callow and innocent than the narrator of the novel; he seems 21 rather than almost 30. His relationship with Jordan disappears. Gatsby's father never makes an appearance after his son's death. Instead, much of the back story he tells Nick in the novel is confessed by Gatsby himself. In the novel Nick states that he had "always disapproved" of Gatsby; the movie is much more of a bromance. The wild vulgarity of the apartment party is only implied the book, and the lunch with Wolfsheim takes place in a flamboyant speakeasy with a chorus line of highly sexualized black dancers instead of in a restaurant. In the book, Nick is fascinated, frightened and also disgusted by Wolfsheim. The movie keeps the fascination and fear but plays down the disgust. Wolfsheim never tells Nick the full story of his relationship with Gatsby, as he does in the book after Gatsby dies. Instead, we hear part of it from Tom.
Luhrman's treatment of the novel makes sense when you put Gatsby in its political context and see the story through Tom Buchanan's eyes. The 1920 Census was the first one in which a majority of Americans lived in cities instead of farms and small towns. The second and third generation of Ellis Island immigrants were becoming a political force. The movies, a business conspicuously dominated by Jews, had grown from nothing to become the most popular entertainment medium in less than 20 years. Jazz had become the dominant popular music, both in its raw African-American form and as mediated by the Jews of Tin Pan Alley. The movies were feared as seductively immoral, and jazz denounced for releasing impulses that decent people never spoke of, much less acted out in public. Young people were engaging in what their elders thought was intolerable sexual license. Organized crime, the product of Prohibition, operated with an open, shameless defiance of the law never seen before. Books like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) predicted that Nordic civilization would be overwhelmed and swept away by inferior races unless eugenic measures were taken to improve the breed. Small town Protestant America was in a full scale moral and demographic panic that seems very familiar today.
Native white Protestant rural and small town Americans felt their country slipping away from them, and they struck back. The modern Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1915. From 1919 into the early 20s white mobs attacked black communities throughout the country. There were mass deportations of alien, mostly Jewish, radicals in 1919-20. Prohibition was enacted in 1920 through the decades long lobbying of the organized Protestant churches. The Immigration Acts of 1920 and 1924 effectively cut off the immigration of Italians, Slavs and Jews.
Luhrman is trying to recapture the atmosphere of traditional America assaulted by frightening new forces. That's why he makes blacks so conspicuous, as servants, as entertainers and, once, as mysteriously prosperous revelers. Because jazz has become familiar, respectable, classical music, he uses hip-hop to recapture the fearful sense of black moral degeneracy infiltrating white society from below. Because Jews are now an accepted and highly visible part of American society, he uses an Indian actor, Amitabh Bachchan, to better communicate the exotic menace that Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim had in 1922.
Most importantly, that's why Luhrman puts Tom Buchanan's strident, pedantic racism front and center, when other aspects of the novel are deemphasized or cut. And it's why, at the climax of the movie, the most damning thing Tom can say about Gatsby is not just that he's a bootlegger but that he -- a real American -- is really a front for "that kike Wolfsheim" in some mysterious financial fraud. Though that expression is true to Tom's character, it isn't in the book.
Luhrman's Gatsby isn't just a self-made nouveau riche vulgar outsider, though he is all that, and he isn't just trying to "make a rumpus" in Tom Buchanan's house and steal away his wife in the name of romance. Gatsby is the agent of subversive forces attacking the civilization that supports Tom and Daisy's place in the world. He is exposed, he fails, Daisy rejects him and Tom destroys him. But ninety years later those forces have triumphed. We are living in the world Tom Buchanan feared, and that Fitzgerald saw struggling to be born. Luhrman is trying to remind us just how contentious that birth was.