Director Baz Luhrmann rose to prominence in the 90s on the back of two critically acclaimed and highly successful films. His first feature was Strictly Ballroom (1992), which used the glitzy, if somewhat shallow world of competitive ballroom dancing to tell a riveting and poignant tale of two lovers separated by class, race and society’s largely arbitrary and pointless rules.
Strictly Ballroom was followed by Romeo + Juliet (1996), an incendiary take on Shakespeare’s often quoted, but seldom understood tragedy. This adaptation kept the original language, but set the action in a gritty yet hyper-real version of contemporary California, with sports cars in place of horses, gangs in place of rival clans, guns in place of swords and TV newsreaders instead narrators. Audiences were electrified, the soundtrack sold well (featuring contemporary acts like Radiohead) and the film, quite rightly, was a huge boost to the nascent careers of the then young Leonardo diCaprio and Clare Danes.
However, Luhrmann’s next two films didn’t do quite so well. Moulin Rouge! (2001) cost close to five times as much to make as Romeo + Juliet and yet managed to take less at the box office. A campy period piece with a fragmented sense of history, a visual spectacle largely devoid of any sexiness or sizzle, Moulin Rouge! was a loud, clanging disappointment.
But, whatever faults we could lay at the door of Lurnmann’s Parisian adventure were soon forgotten when the risible outback epic, Australia (2008) hit the screens. Starring Australia’s two most bankable Hollywood stars, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, this was an essentially small story set on a vast canvas, largely devoid of ideas or substance. Australia was a commercial and critical failure. Many started to wonder what had happened to Luhrmann’s assured directorial style.
Which brings us to his latest release, a long awaited adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Not only is the director again bringing a well recognised (if perhaps not that often read) classic to the screen, he is also reunited with Leonardo diCaprio, as the enigmatic embodiment of the New Gilded Age, Jay Gatsby.
In a way, this period, of opulent wealth and extravagant entertainment seems to fit Lurhmann’s loud and somewhat gaudy aesthetic. Luhrmann seems to revel in bring those riches along with the fashions and parties they fuelled to life. But, for Gatsby, the parties were just a device, a means to an end.
What makes The Great Gatsby such a timely story for our own age of excess is not just the richly drawn pictures of unrestrained consumption, but the subtly drawn critique Fitzgerald weaved, quite surprisingly, into his expertly crafted prose, the way the story challenges our own tendency to be seduced by wealth and how we can wrongly judge who is entitled to it.
One of the great themes of the novel is the way wealthy people play with the lives of ordinary folk, manipulating reputations and destroying lives. With that in mind, what is the point of casting Amitabh Bachchan, an acclaimed Indian actor and quite possibly the most successful actor of all time, if we count popular longevity and box office sales, in a relatively minor (in terms of screen time) and somewhat cartoonish role? Or, of giving the part of Dr. Walter Perkins to Jack Thompson, the best Australian actor of his generation only for him to dwell largely in the background and out of focus?
Of course, both actors do well, Bachchan chewing up the scenery and Thompson brining gravitas to his lines. And, it could be said, both appear in pivotal scenes. But, why bring in such actors only to largely cast them aside? Is this irony? A play on Fitzgerald’s theme? Or, something else?
In way, the same can be said of newcomer, Elizabeth Debicki, who lights up the screen every time she appears as Jordan Baker. She is lithe, sinewy and draws the camera to her every look and movement. She brings a sense of mystery and suggestion, but her scenes often feel poorly cut, as if every good moment on screen is matched by an equally good moment on the cutting room floor.
That Debicki moves so well only makes it clearly how awkwardly everything else, from extras to sets and backdrops move around her. The same can often said of DiCaprio, who illuminates the screen as Gatsby, yet often feels painted onto the film, like a wisened old traveller standing in front of a tourism poster.
Despite the fabulous sets and elaborate, extras riddled scenes, and copious use of CGI, The Great Gatsby doesn’t really manage to bring it’s context to life. This is a film with plenty of grand rooms and no sense of architecture, set on opulent estates that look like toy houses, which vast cars that glide as if not connected to the dirty roads on which they travel.
At times it feels like a comic book adaptation. We get all sorts of computer generated panning and elevated shots, as if the camera was tethered to balloons, or sent sailing over lakes. They are grand cinematic perspectives from nowhere, they seldom give us a sense of the world as actual people see it.
Which is a shame because The Great Gatsby is not adapted from a comic book, it is adapted from a novel, a novel filled with fine, subtle detail. A novel many consider to be the greatest American Novel of all time. Lurhmann tries to remind the viewer of this, in scenes where the text appears on screen, but his film and the look it creates, all too often washes out the details.
More than once I found myself wishing Luhrmann had tried to shoot the exact same film, with the same cast and the same lines, but with no CGI. It’s hard not to imagine that film would have been better, richer and more engaging.
Still, The Great Gatsby is far from a failure. The aforementioned Bachchan, Debicki and Thompson are not the only acting highlights. Tobey Maguire brings a fitting amount of awe and discomfort to his performance as Gatsby’s friend (and the story’s narrator) Nick Carraway. Gatsby’s great love interest, Daisy Buchanan, described in the novel as having “a voice full of money,” is brought to life in her fickle and flighty beauty by Carey Mulligan. And, there are solid turns from Joel Edgerton as Daisy’s entitled and brutish husband Tom, Isla Fisher as his mistress Myrtle Wilson and Jason Clarke as Myrtle’s naive and cuckolded husband George. And, of course, there is the anchor of the film, Leonardo diCaprio as Gatsby.
For all the fake CGI backdrops and gurning, campy artifice that Lurhmann tries to inject (including some horribly misguided musical numbers and background score), it’s really these actors, and the moments when they are allowed to own their scenes, when the camera fixes hard on their performance as they deliver Fitzgerald’s lines, it’s in these moments The Great Gatsby is at it’s most assured.
And, these self same moments remind us of the great work Luhrmann has delivered in the past and allow us, much like to the ever hopeful Gatsby himself, to dream his film-making might one day return to what it once was and the years of disappointment would be erased.
