The Great Gatsby Review: This ain't your mother's Gatsby, old sport

Dir. Baz Luhrmann
143 Minutes
Rated PG-13

I have to admit: I used Sparknotes in high school.  I never really made it all the way through the original F. Scott Fitzgerald book, and I'm unsure if that's because it truly was boring, or if I just wasn't cultured enough to sit through it.  The Great Gatsby is one of those iconic stories that's never had a great film attached to it, though many have tried.  Now Baz Luhrmann is entering the ring, putting his over-the-top ADHD spin on it.  On a conceptual level this is pretty ambitious stuff: Jay Z produced the music, there are tons of weird anachronisms, the camera moves around so fast you'll get whiplash, and not to mention it's a romantic character drama shot in 3D.  I personally did not catch this one in 3D, and because I'm behind on my movie-watching, I have also never seen a previous film by Luhrmann.  Sorry, my fellow movie-goers, it's just one of my blindspots.  But from what I hear they are similarly bombastic.  Really I just wanted to watch this in the hope that maybe his revisionist take on the material would finally make The Great Gatsby relatable and/or bearable for me for the first time, and I also wanted to see Leo again because he is simply a dreamboat.


First off, I just want to say that this definitely was a ballsy endeavor, and some chunks of the film work perfectly.  Leonardo DiCaprio is amazing as the titular Jay Gatsby.  It's an incredibly complex portrait of this mysterious wealthy man who has everything but wants just one thing: Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).  The trouble is, Mulligan is married to the bigoted macho-man Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).   Both Mulligan and Edgerton are equally fantastic, especially Mulligan, who successfully pulls off a difficult character to portray.  Daisy has to straddle the line between a ditzy, indecisive blonde and this irresistible woman that two powerful men will fight over.

I loved the ideas behind the movie.  The sets, the out of place Jay Z music, the costumes: all of it looked and sounded amazing.  But there were still a lot of problems with the film.  Maybe it was because I saw it in 2D, but there were a lot of "swooping" camera shots that were just not pleasant to watch.  Something about it was too "CGI" for a story like this.  I also thought most of the stuff with Tobey Maguire was terrible; I loved him in the Spider-Man movies, but here he was pretty much just the narrator, and it was very different from the book.  Here he is actually telling the story from a mental asylum, and the movie is actually a book he is writing, so randomly there will be words being typed over a scene, or Tobey's voice will intercut an important moment that would be 10x more powerful without it.  The film worked best in its quiet moments, like when Gatsby reunites with Daisy for the first time is so well done, or during an extended scene which results in a fight between Gatsby and Tom.  But when there are tons of CGI buildings flying by your head and when Tobey Maguire is basically describing every last detail as it was in the book, it just lost me.

The Great Gatsby is definitely an interesting, bold take on the source material, but it had a lot of distracting issues.  The best thing about it is Leonardo Dicaprio's performance, which is probably among his best.  There were isolated scenes that worked really well, but the majority of it was stale, and I still didn't care about the plot or what was going to happen.  I think Luhrmann was excited to take this book and go crazy with it, but he should have gone farther with his own vision; I could tell that many scenes were bogged down by the fact that he was sticking too closely to the source material.  It's a commendable effort, but not one I particularly enjoyed.

Rating: C


Bonus - Related Internet Video:

So you just watched the latest Great Gatsby adaptation, but did you know there have been five movies based off of the original book?  This here is the only remaining footage from the first ever Great Gatsby movie from 1926.  Considered a 'lost film,' a full print of it has never been found; all we have is this little trailer.