Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for sexual candor, violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.10.13
Teachers have been aggravated for
generations, when Hollywood brings a classic novel to the big screen; too many
lazy students then seek answers from the film, rather than reading the book.
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| The pomp and splash of a fancy nightclub cannot prevent Tom (Joel Edgerton, far right) from noticing that his wife, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), is being wooed shamelessly by Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, far left). Nick (Tobey Maguire), growing accustomed to the emotional chaos that inevitably erupts when in the company of his new friends, adopts his favorite means of retreat: another stiff drink. |
Well, here’s a twist: Director
Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant, mesmerizing adaptation of The Great Gatsby likely
will encourage people to buy and read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Rarely
has a movie so successfully breathed fresh excitement into a literary work
which, no matter how well regarded by scholars, often is regarded as a yawn by
readers.
It’s like struggling through
Shakespeare’s prose on the printed page, absorbing very little along the way,
and then seeing the play come to energetic life when staged with a cast of
articulate and charismatic actors.
Yep, Luhrmann’s accomplishment is
that impressive.
For openers, the film is a visual
masterpiece; it’s literally breathtaking. (Cinematographer Simon Duggan, take a
bow.) Never has 3-D cinematography been used so cleverly, or so successfully;
the dimensionality opens up the narrative’s symbolic settings, thus lending
greater emotional weight to the class-burdened archetypes represented by the
five primary characters.
At the same time, Luhrmann and co-scripter
Craig Pearce are impressively faithful to Fitzgerald’s original prose, at times
bringing large chunks of text to life via the hyper-realism that Luhrmann
employed so well in Moulin Rouge.
You’ll not soon forget production
designer Catherine Martin’s grandiosely ghastly realization of Fitzgerald’s
so-called “Valley of Ashes,” the desolate, begrimed region that separates the
decadence of both New York City and the outlying aristocratic enclave of West
Egg. (Fitzgerald was inspired by the hellish trash-burning zone along the road
from Great Neck to Manhattan, the sole transit in an era before the Long Island
Expressway or the Grand Central Parkway.)
Given Luhrmann’s sensibilities
and visual pizzazz, it’s easy to imagine him particularly captivated by one
element in Fitzgerald’s description of this site: the huge “eyes of Doctor T.J.
Eckleburg” that stare out from the remnants of an oculist’s long-discarded
billboard. Almost more than Gatsby’s palatial estate — also a spectacular
setting — these giant eyes become one of the film’s driving images: the blank
stare of an omniscient being who catalogues but does not interfere with the
events that take place in the gas station located in a small settlement — not
even a town — perched on one edge of this stygian, lung-fouling inferno.
