Review: The Great(ish) Gatsby

In Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo Di Caprio’s Frank Abagnale is a young chameleon with the gift of appearing as whatever he thinks people want him to be without ever comprehending what he truly is. There is much of Abagnale in Gatsby. At 38, Di Caprio projects an illusion of youth that brings Jay Gatsby, a man on first-name terms with everyone but close to no-one, to life with vivid effect.

The Great Gatsby is in essence a character piece, and Luhrmann’s film is most charming on those occasions where it is allowed time and space to breathe. Absent of the dizzying cuts and aerial views that disorientate the viewer in the opening scenes, Di Caprio’s nervous tending to Nick Carraway’s garden strikes just the right pitch of restlessness as Emeli Sande’s murmuring rendition of Crazy In Love helps move the scene along at a perfectly neurotic pace.

Such occasions are unfortunately rare however, and the meeting of Gatsby and Daisy that follows crystallises the faults of the film. So promising in the build-up, Luhrmann fails to deliver much more than an opulent Mad Hatters tea-party. As Gatsby dismantled his clock, I half-expected a dormouse to emerge from Daisy’s teapot. Truly, Luhrmann’s Gatsby possesses little of the subtlety of the novel.

Luhrmann’s film is a piledriver of a picture. Instead of offering a “satisfactory hint at the unreality of reality” that pushed a generation to the edge of a precipice in the 1920s, Gatsby overwhelms its audience with a kaleidoscope carnival of colours. At the party scenes, Gatsby’s guests do not bubble over before reaching their violent crescendo but exist in a constant state of frenzy. Gatsby’s pink suit and yellow Rolls-Royce, such significant symbols of pretension in the novel, are hardly distinguished in an environment where everything else seems to be just as bold and just as vivid.

Gatsby’s tragedy is that his veins do not flow green with money. Luhrmann’s is that no amount of rich disguise and digital trickery can distract from the shortcomings of his film. In the company of Di Caprio, Toby Maguire is like a boy playing at acting. When Maguire utters the words “I just remembered today’s my birthday” the audience laughs. As Nick, Maguire is too often the jester. In the absence of Gatsby’s father and the Buchanan daughter, Luhrmann fails to define the motivations of his characters. Mulligan’s charms especially are too slender to carry the psychological weight of Daisy Fay.

The film does, however, possess redeeming features. As Tom, Joel Edgerton comes into his own in the second part of the film. Edgerton is redolent of Daniel Day Lewis as he ferociously puts down Gatsby’s claim to Daisy. The enormous block of ice from which Tom makes his drinks communicates the excesses of these lives more precisely than any cartoonish party. It is more the pity that Luhrman’s cannot trust to sketching similarly effective images elsewhere in the film.

Iconic is a word much overused, but Di Caprio’s portrayal of Gatsby is a great achievement. Variously considered a spy, foreigner or social outsider, Gatsby is implicitly viewed by others as being un-American. So cool and elusive to begin with, Di Caprio perfectly re-captures that lost boy Abagnale as Gatsby falters and his whole identity dissipates. When Gatsby is found cowering beneath Daisy’s bushes he has finally become “Mr No-One from Nowhere”. Di Caprio no longer cuts an elegant wartime hero but a tortured Peter Pan; the magic by which he soared so high now turned to dust in his hands. Throughout the film Gatsby’s associates gather around him like sinister golems, sapping him of his energy. It is to Luhrman’s fault that despite Di Caprio’s efforts he is ensnared by the ordinariness that surrounds him, a cruel fate which he shares with the character he plays.

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