Searching for the elusive green light

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2013)

It has always being considered as the 'Great American Novel', and considered unfilmable at the same time. Such is the veneration for the novel meant that there is always a great deal of responsibility to whoever is adapting it on screen, and Australian film director Baz Luhrmann's take on an American classic is the sixth attempt, since the days of the silent film era.
The plot is known to generations of readers who have read the novel. But it is the opening scene which may have some taken aback on how narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tried to recall the events taking place in the summer of 1922 on Long Island and New York especially on Long Island's West Egg where he and his mysterious wealthy neighbour Jay Gatsby (Leonardo diCapiro) had lived. Carraway had initially no idea whether anyone would want to read on the events which took place in that particular summer which had quite an impact on his life, but his doctor at the sanitarium where Carraway was at encouraged him to do so.
Thus Carraway let his writings do the talking on what happened three years before, which began with him talking about the America he knew at that time as he began his career as a bond trader in New York, his home on West Egg and living next door to Gatsby, along with the visit to the Buchanan mansion opposite the lake on East Egg where he will meet his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), cousin-in-law Tom (Joel Edgerton) whom he knew from their time at Yale and Daisy's childhood friend and golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) where they will all have dinner together. Before the conversation flowed at dinner, Jordan had remarked about a party she had attended at Gatsby's mansion, leading to Daisy wondering whom her childhood friend was talking about.
But little did the narrator Carraway realised that the man who is his mysterious neighbour does also have a relationship with his cousin. It would only be after he had been invited to the party, and the only one being invited where everyone else just found their way to Gatsby's mansion with people of all sorts, he began to slowly unravel through the glitz and glamour of the parties his neighbour Gatsby had threw consistently on weekends after both men were reunited since both served in the same unit on the front during the war, that he began to learn of the man behind the parties, and from Gatsby's Jewish friend Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan). At the same time, learning about Gatsby's connection to his cousin Daisy with also Jordan acting as the go-between as she recounted the day when she first saw Gatsby and the tensions leading up to Daisy's wedding to Tom Buchanan.
That is not the only thing which had a profound impact on Carraway in that particular summer. There is also the affair between his cousin-in-law Tom and his mistress Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), whom Tom first met at the garage ran by Myrtle's husband George (Jason Clarke) at the Valley of Ashes, and the people Tom and Myrtle know in New York whom he met including Myrtle's older sister Catherine (Adelaide Clemens).
Things start to go a little awry at the Gatsby mansion after Daisy and Gatsby were reunited, leading to all sorts of questions being asked in the newspapers over the origins of Gatsby's enormous wealth, which is also something Daisy's husband Tom started to get a little suspicious over apart from wondering how and when his wife first met Gatsby. The chain of events leading to the final fate of his neighbour and friend Gatsby would lead to Carraway becoming a changed man on how he look at the America he once knew.
Much has been debated over the fusing of hip-hop into a film which is set in the 1920s where it also known as the 'Jazz Age', but it is also bringing it to a modern audience with a contemporary relevance apart from how people in that period would interpret jazz as how Lhurmann saw it. Other than that, one would probably a sense of déjà vu over the film's plot and how it mirrors the America the narrator Carraway saw, and the constant reference to the green light as seen from the dock of the Buchanan mansion and how that fitted into the whole narrative.
Still, it is the spirit of the novel being reflected on screen which had stayed true for very much throughout. It is the story which still has its current relevance.