Fanlore's Journal

The Great Gatsby. Dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2013.

I was describing this movie to shveta_writes and her husband, and at the end I realized that my description was actually pretty positive. I liked this movie! I don't think it's anywhere near as terrible as many critics made it out to be, though I should mention that it's been a good ten years since I last read the book--since, in fact, my eleventh grade English teacher assigned me an essay on the color symbolism and when I worked out the color symbolism it revealed that F. Scott Fitzgerald was pretty misogynist.

It probably shouldn't have taken me an essay on color symbolism to figure that out.

My sister and I agreed that the movie gets a lot of things right--the atmosphere of the 1920s, New York in the Jazz Age, and how over the top it really was, in a way that's familiar to the 1% of our era but was unimaginable, or unfilmable, for most of the intervening decades. It goes without saying that the man who directed Moulin Rouge made sure that this movie had a phenomenal soundtrack, and the music works very well as part of the movie, too. (Check Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine in the film, playing the part of the girl who sings while crying!) The costuming too was pretty great, and I have to say that I am willing to let some of its minor anachronisms slide. Primarily, of course, Baz Luhrmann is a genius at putting parties on film (which is kind of ironic), and given that half the plot of Gatsby is either driven by or a reaction to "he throws big parties OMG," the man and the subject matter are well matched. Ain't no party like a Luhrmann Gatsby party.

I thought the actors did a good job too. I really can't stand Tobey Maguire, and in some ways I think he's the weakest of the leads, though by the end I was fine with his performance. (Though, seriously, don't get Tobey Maguire to read your audiobooks.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Carrie Mulligan were also pretty good; my main problem with the actors and the script, in fact, was that THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH JORDAN BAKER. She is so great! And there was so little of her!

I also had a lot of problems with the shoddy conversion to 2D--filming the movie in 3D makes a lot of the establishing shots look like bad miniature work, and in many of the close-up night studio scenes the actors' skin looked mildly pixelated, and there was a bit of a prism effect at the edges of their faces. Relatedly: they should have done fewer of the night scenes in the studio. Especially in a smaller theater, all this was really obvious; it's not obvious to me how shooting in 3D made this a better movie, as the composition of the shots wasn't really designed to take advantage of 3D. (Dare I say that there are a lot of movies that have no compelling need for 3D.)

In the end, this was a very credible adaptation, and probably the best I've seen. It says a lot about how The Great Gatsby is taught in schools that it took the movie's visually hitting the audience over the head with the race and class structures on which the story is based for me to really grasp that this book isn't about the American dream or what the fuck ever; it's about class and classism, and how for Fitzgerald class is not something you can ever overcome. Race isn't even on his radar, except in his anti-Semitism, which thankfully the film didn't seem to make too much of. Nick is alienated enough from his birth class by his need to have a job that he's able to connect with Gatsby, and then to leave New York and write the book; the revelation to him that Gatsby is worth all the rest of them put together, after everything, is the central moral judgment of the story. The end of Gatsby's extraordinary career bears him out.