All the Sad Young Men (A Great Gatsby review)

Poster by Sharm Murugiah.

I felt (adapting Gatsby) was a very chancy thing to attempt. A lot of what was in the novel was by suggestion. So much of it was in prose and so much of it was utterly untranslatable, and even if you could translate it, I thought it would be a thankless task and you'd just be some Hollywood hack who fucked up a classic. I felt that I had a lot to lose and very little to gain. That whole book is a mirage. - Robert Towne

Often considered a candidate for the title of "The Great American Novel", and more likely considered by every high school student as "that book in the 20s that's full of assholes", The Great Gatsby went unappreciated upon release, with F. Scott Fitzgerald going to his grave believing his work was a failure. The book got a second wind in 1942, where it proved to be incredibly popular with soldiers, and soon with the rest of the world, including Hollywood.

There have been, to date, four previous film adaptations of Fitzgerald's novel - a 1926 silent version by Herbert Brenon of which only a trailer survives; Elliott Nugent's efforts in 1949 which is difficult to get a hold of; a made-for-TV movie in 2000; and the most well-known, the 1974 adaptation with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, boasting a script by Francis Ford Coppola. By all accounts, none of these really came close to the mark. Robert Towne turned down a handsome offer of $175,000 to adapt Gatsby, plumping instead to write his original screenplay Chinatown for $25,000, because he considered Fitzgerald's kiss with a fist to the Jazz Age unfilmable.

So along came Baz Luhrmann to take his stab at it with his loyal co-writer Craig Pearce. You've got to admire their ambition, at least.

Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is in counselling. He's been burnt out after the events on the Long Island village of West Egg, but having trouble vocalising his memories, he instead commits them to paper and ink. He tells of the time he moved to New York as a bond salesman, of being reunited with his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her old money husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). He tells of the legendary bacchanals thrown by his neighbour, the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), known for holding the best parties, yet nobody knows where he's from or even what he looks like. He tells of the day Gatsby contacted him in the hopes he would reunite him with Daisy, his old flame from long ago.

And boy, does he tell. Luhrmann and Pearce must agree with Towne's assumption that the novel is untranslatable, since their approach is to just shove the text into the frame. They seemed to have forgotten that films are a visual medium, and that putting prose onto the screen to make it more like a book is like a man inhaling deadly amounts of helium so he can become more like a balloon. There's an attempt at building a dense collage of image and sound and text, but the presentation of the prose doesn't engage. It's literally just words-on-screen, fading in and out of view like the world's most expensive PowerPoint presentation.

Oh, but this pales in comparison to the narration, which does its best to strangle the drama. The golden rule of storytelling is "Show, Don't Tell" - let the audience figure things out on their own, don't serve them the answers on a platter. Carraway just loves to tell. Why have your actors show their conflicts, their agonies, and their delights, when you can just have a narrator tell the audience what they're thinking? It gets downright comical at times, like when Gatsby tells Carraway about his past. It's like Luhrmann and Pearce couldn't decide who should tell it and just went "Fuck it, have both of 'em do it!" This isn't helped by the character of Carraway - I can't tell if this is just Maguire's performance or a problem with the original writing, but he's annoyingly passive. He just stands around watching everything else go on around him, full of cynicism towards others yet never feeling the need to speak up about all the affairs flying about. It's hard to engage with his story when you just want to smack your leading man around the face and yell "DO SOMETHING YOU TWAT!"

DiCaprio emerges stronger as the eponymous Gatsby, a superficially charming but guarded man, housing some darkness inside. He's a phantom, a nobody who happens to cast a very big shadow, and it works here. Edgerton gets some good moments as the brutish Tom, making him sneering and loutish while also investing the character with moments of humanity. Mulligan is more problematic - she looks too young to play the world-weary Daisy, a woman who's supposedly seen the world and done everything in it (truth be told, she looks no older than when she was in the Doctor Who episode "Blink" six years ago), even if she does seem to be trying her best with the material given. Daisy is basically a cipher, so I can't fault Mulligan for doing what she can with the character.

The advent of the RealD 3D film camera, a heavier beast than filmmakers are used to, means that Luhrmann's usual heady brand of hyper-stylized visual madness is somewhat more distilled, forcing him to hold shots for longer and not cut between scenes every four nanoseconds like he did with the headache-inducing Moulin Rouge!. By focusing his eye for visuals, one can better appreciate the very pretty cinematography. The introduction of Daisy in a lush room of billowing silk curtains is gorgeous, even if it does look a bit like a perfume commercial, and Gatsby's parties are every bit as decadent and fun as you'd imagine them to be. Most of the sets are green-screened or use a copious amount of CG, but it works to the film's advantage. Gatsby is a story about artificiality, so why not have your cast traipse about artificial sets? Luhrmann even uses 3D to good effect, with an opening sequence where the image is stretched back further into the screen, inviting viewers in.

The Jay-Z produced soundtrack is something of a mixed bag. They use the Knight's Tale trick of having modern music stand in for music of the period, showing that a Jazz Age-era bash was the 1920s equivalent of a night in a club. Hip-hop numbers and R'n'B covers are played during the parties, and even if they're not good (one of them is by will.i.am, so you already know what it's like), they work in context. The rest of the soundtrack, however, is...curious, for want of a better term. Sometimes Hova and composer Craig Armstrong insert contemporary songs as they are into the film, but other times they go with jazz covers, like the Bryan Ferry Orchestra reworking "Crazy in Love" and "Love is the Drug". Not content with that, some covers of newer songs are thrown in that don't comfortably belong in any category, like Beyoncé and Andre 3000's cover of "Back to Black". It's schizophrenic to say the least, almost like they didn't have the courage to go through with their original plan of "hip-hop = jazz". One of the better numbers is Lana Del Rey's elegant "Young and Beautiful" - Del Rey has carved out a niche with her repackaging of Americana, so you can't say it doesn't belong, and it even becomes a leitmotif for Daisy's relationship with Gatsby. It's a soundtrack for the iTunes generation, with all the songs making sense for a Gatsby film, but none really put to good use within the film itself.

Luhrmann's love of gilding the lily may be to the film's ultimate cost. The novel can be finished in a lunch break, but it packs a lot into that brief page count: a deconstruction of the American Dream, a bitter dismissal of the Jazz Age, the barriers between class, and the contradiction of escaping the past while excavating the best parts to build an eternal Fantasyland. Fitzgerald came to the conclusion that the American Dream was that a man could come from anywhere and make a name of himself, his history discarded like an old set of clothes. In Jay Gatsby, he inverted it - Gatsby can throw as many shindigs as he pleases, have more money than Croesus, and buy all the beautiful shirts in Christendom, but he will never be free, and he will never be satisfied. The American Dream is like the green light Gatsby forever reaches out to - visible, but never attainable.

This isn't complex stuff, but it's Infinite Jest compared to everything else Luhrmann has tackled before. His best films are ones that use hypercharged melodramatic spectacle to boost thin plots. Romeo + Juliet worked because everyone knows the story. Moulin Rouge! worked because you could write the entire story on a napkin. Gatsby has more going on than either of them, and the devil is very much in the details, something that just isn't compatible with Luhrmann's big sweeping visions. This may be why he approaches it as a love story, occasionally chucking another shot of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's billboard or the green light at the end of the harbour in lieu of actually exploring the themes. The visual language is in keeping with romantic melodrama, but it's painfully ill-suited to the material. Gatsby is as much of a love story as Wuthering Heights. Both look like grand romances if you glance through them, but both are about two horrendously incompatible people trying, and failing, to make sparks ignite, and the ruin that befalls both of them. Sincerity burns like a candle in Luhrmann's heart, and it doesn't work for something as cynical as Gatsby - this must be why, when Gatsby and Daisy finally meet, the film loses all the energy built up in the first half, and all the stylised cinematography looks the wrong kind of hollow. Even as the romance is bled out, Luhrmann just can't bring himself to do the same.

The Great Gatsby has fallen into the same trap as its protagonist. So obsessed with trying to buy the audience's love with a hip soundtrack and striking visuals, it fails to disguise the fact it just can't deliver the goods. I guess The Mediocre Gatsby doesn't have quite the same ring to it, or maybe the deceptively tricky nature of the novel means it just can't work in film. Perhaps an ideal adaptation lies somewhere, like the green light at the end of the harbour.

Still, I got to see it in a tux with my buddy Phil. How often does one get to do that?