The Great Gatsby: A Review

Jay Gatsby is not so much a man as a hope-filled teenager, one of the most wonderful on the planet; there are hardly any like him. Nick Carraway, a man who seemed to be born old (like Benjamin Button, another Fitzgerald character), narrates his story. The contrast between the characters is what Fitzgerald’s novel hinges on; the entire book resembles a long, envious, sad sigh of a person who will never be able to love anyone as Gatsby loves Daisy. Gatsby is great. Carraway is not. The narrator is aware. He knows that his neat life is inferior to Gatsby’s, that he will not find true joy or true courage in it – but he cannot even admit it to himself; he begins the narrative with “blah-blah-blah” and would continue it as “blah-blah-blah”: blah-blah-blah, I am right, and I despise people like him, however, because… And his whole life would be like that, if Gatsby hadn’t flashed through it like lightning.

The Eternal Appeal of Gatsby

Of course, the most grateful audience for “The Great Gatsby” is sixteen-year-olds. However, it can easily be read at 20 or 30 – it automatically awakens all the best and most tender teenage feelings in you. And Baz Luhrmann, the director of “Romeo + Juliet,” “Moulin Rouge,” and “Australia,” a man whose characters always live by bare emotions, is once again trying to awaken them.

Luhrmann said that he decided to film “Gatsby…” while traveling through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express: he was traveling through the fields, listening to the audiobook, and thinking about the Russian rich who suddenly made their millions and now live in luxury. In fact, “Gatsby…” is as much an American story as it is a Russian one in spirit. There is something of Dostoevsky in it, something of the film “Tycoon,” something of a drunken rich man selflessly dancing on a table to a Britney Spears song; something even of “A Cruel Romance,” only the hero is also a young, almost flawless American handsome man – well, he sold alcohol during Prohibition, so thank you, thank you to him, the benefactor; and all this is romanticized and melodramatized to such an extent that many Russians have cried and will cry over this novel (and this film).

A Sensational, Trashy Masterpiece?

I don’t even know how to explain it. Here’s what the author of The New York Times writes in a recent review: “Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a sensational, empty, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, detached, sentimental, and artificial film. In other words, it is a magnificent adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic novel.” And further, he writes that the characters in the novel are implausible, that it itself is stylized, cold, cool, sexy, and abstract, that it has a sterility, unreality, falseness of a dream, that Gatsby himself is somehow suspicious…

In Russia (and probably in America, where this has been the main novel for almost a hundred years), the reviewer would be beaten up already on the third epithet, without waiting for him to finish piling them up. What’s wrong with it: well, yes, a beautiful and intelligent person lives for love and earns money dishonestly only for love, because he has nothing more important. And although he doesn’t want to die for her, he is, in principle, ready.

“But it doesn’t happen like that,” lovers said in one of the best Soviet films of the 60s, “I Am Walking Through Moscow.” And then, closing their eyes, they answered themselves: “But it does.”

Luhrmann’s Exaggerated Vision

In the film, Nick Carraway is not as dry as in the book; on the one hand, Tobey Maguire’s typical silly expression changes things, and on the other hand, Luhrmann sharply dislikes the career that the character has chosen. From Luhrmann’s point of view, the main Hollywood lover of making things shiny and lush, working on Wall Street is terribly boring, and Nick Carraway spends several seconds in the office throughout the film, and spends most of his time drinking and partying. The parties take place in the house of his neighbor Gatsby, who lives in fantastic luxury.

Fitzgerald himself stubbornly compared Gatsby to Trimalchio, the hero of Petronius’ “Satyricon.” Luhrmann sees the difference in that Gatsby always wears white (even if he is actually in black). He is a con man, but a noble one; he is by no means a libertine; he does not indulge in gluttony and hardly eats at all; although everyone around him is gorging themselves and behaving like pigs, Gatsby himself remains faithful not to physical pleasures, but to an ideal. He is a generous and kind romantic who looks every evening at the green light burning across the bay opposite his house in the mansion where his first, last, only, and eternal love, Daisy Buchanan, lives. (Needless to say, Luhrmann, being generous, makes this famous green light shine across half the screen for almost the entire film.)

Luhrmann actually adheres quite accurately to the outline of the novel, changing only the details.

Luhrmann generally squeezes much more out of the “Gatsby…” tube than was originally laid down in it by nature and the author. In addition to Gershwin (under which the beautiful hero Leonardo DiCaprio first luxuriously turns and smiles at the viewer), Jay-Z (one of the film’s producers), Beyoncé, and Andre 3000 sound; scandals and declarations of love are also similar to separate musical numbers; some pictures in the film make you want to shout “Stop, you haven’t been looked at yet” (New Yorkers of the 20s, if they lived to 2013, would be very surprised to find out in what alien city they lived – sometimes it’s almost “The Fifth Element”); everyone is bulging their eyes and puffing out their cheeks; just as Kidman in “Moulin Rouge” imitated an orgasm, DiCaprio here in some scenes imitates shyness and passion (in the trailer it looked terrible, but in the film – OK, quite normal).

A Melodrama Pushed to the Limit

This is generally a wonderful melodrama – the gas is squeezed to the limit, Gatsby and Daisy rush forward, forgetting about everything, in feelings that are disheveled to the limit, with bare nerves. Amitabh Bachchan shines with a smile for exactly three minutes – well, how could such a movie do without Amitabh? The letters in the text that Nick Carraway composes (which the acquaintance with Gatsby made hypersensitive and who, only by pouring the story on paper, can get rid of it) are constantly circling in luxurious 3D. And you suddenly realize that only Luhrmann of all today’s directors could tell it correctly. Rapidly, passionately, sonorously, loudly (let’s not be afraid of epithets, since such a spree has begun), with DiCaprio reddened with excitement and Maguire clamped from the realization of his own joyless future, with Carey Mulligan’s trembling lips, with whiskey, wine, dancing, with two shots in the finale. Sentimental, seductive, trashy, unreal, sexy, cool. It seems that he did not succeed with “Romeo + Juliet” – but with Gatsby he succeeded to the fullest.

One can imagine how this novel would be filmed by, say, today’s Spielberg. But I don’t even want to think about it.