The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years a friend gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing a film," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world aren’t anoraks who used to rent four films a day from their university DVD library and announce to long-suffering flatmates, with a self-congratulatory sigh, that they’d better get back to the Tarkovsky box set. Nobody gives a toss if a scene reminds you of Béla Tarr, or if a tracking shot is “so Nuri Bilge Ceylan”. It’s Baz Lurhmann, for fuck’s sake! Nice Baz Lurhmann, who had the decency to go on Jonathan Ross and do his bit for a fun new take on a beloved book. Stop showing off and just talk about the damn film.”

The Great Gatsby. The Great bloody Gatsby. I wonder if it’s one of those books, like On The Road or Camus’ The Outsider, that loses a certain youth-inflated vitality when you reread it later in life. When I read it for the first time at eighteen, it was bloody wonderful: the cagey narrator; the moonlit, humanist lyricism; the injustice of it all. When I read it again a few months ago, it wasn’t quite the life-affirming Great American Novel I remember, but a major work in a minor key – a slender, melancholic, occasionally mannered prose poem of ambition, longing and identity. However, I fear that Baz Lurhmann – for all his swooping party shots and lovely clothes and smart musical anachronisms – has sandblasted the subtlety out of it.

This Gatsby is a peculiar mix of slavish fidelity to the novel and a slather of Lurhmann’s own can’t-help-himself flourishes. Let’s start with the flourishes.

Our narrator Nick Carraway, that elusive outsider’s insider, has been planted onto a therapist’s couch and his written recollections of mysterious former neighbour Jay Gatsby provide the narrative frame of the story; this is a trite, unnecessary device that becomes more irritating as the film progresses. Lurhmann loves jerking back and forth: sometimes this works quite well (the restless editing of a desultory dinner party, Nick’s first with the Buchanans, gives the viewer an appropriate sort of social seasickness); at others it’s overflogged, as with the to-ing and fro-ing over the stretch of water from Gatsby’s house to Daisy’s. As such, at Meaningful Moments, the flow of the story jars back to Nick in his therapist’s office, deep in thought or passed out from too much writing, with his therapist bringing in cups of tea or tiptoeing around Nick’s papers as though they’re the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can’t help but feel Baz has treated the novel with the same tendentious awe as the psychiatrist treats Nick.

The visual brio of the film, Lurhmann’s trademark, is undoubtedly impressive, especially in the party scenes, which fall somewhere between a big brash music video, a Chanel advert and a Ken Russell rock opera. The music bolsters them, not just Jay-Z, but a Little Black Book of the novel’s talented fans (including Florence and the Machine, Lana del Rey and The XX): there’s a particularly fun, Goodfellas-type entrance to a secret party under a barbershop. It’s all just a bit soulless, more in keeping with the Brand Gatsby plastered in Harrods’ front windows as part of the advertising campaign than the low-key spirit of the original. Where’s Nick’s sense of loneliness? I always found the novel’s party scenes devastatingly solitary, whereas here Tobey Maguire just seems to be having a bit of a laugh. Even Tom Ford’s A Single Man, veneered with a similar Vogue magazine glossiness, managed to be delicate and wistful, thanks mainly to Colin Firth. But this Gatsby often feels like a musical without the singing, whose performances belong to the Les Misérables, “This Is My Happy Face, Now This Is My Sad Face” school of acting.

So, the performances. Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly good – initially radiant with charisma; a frenetic, past-darkened shadow of himself as time wears on – though his Gatsby has little of the sadness or intensity of his performance in The Aviator as Howard Hughes, a real-life, rich, reclusive, America-as-man. Carey Mulligan, an admirably unstudied performer, is slightly irritating as Daisy Buchanan, and I’m still not sure whether it’s because she succeeded in capturing a maddening character or whether she fell a bit short. Either way, I’ve never seen what all the fuss was about Daisy. She’s a terrible mother (one of the film’s few subtleties is the reminder, right at the end, that Daisy has a daughter), flirts with all men (including her cousin Nick), and, with a “voice full of money”, prides high society comfort over everything else. The scene where Gatsby gives Daisy the tour of his house and she expects music to be played in the ballroom, with Gatsby flinging designer clothes at her, made me feel a bit sick. Of course she was never going to leave Tom: unlike Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, the perks that come from being her husband’s wife are too great for Daisy. This makes for a much sadder, more pragmatically believable ending than running away with Gatsby. The best love stories are often those left unfulfilled (Casablanca; Brief Encounter; the gorgeous In The Mood For Love), but by the end of this Gatsby I wasn’t yearning across the bay for what might have been, I was wondering why Gatsby had wasted his time on a girl as materialistic and conformist as Daisy, a girl who loves Tom’s unenlightened, unearned social standing more than she loves Gatsby’s wild, self-made idealism and who prefers to forgive Tom years of philandering than Gatsby a one-off loss of temper.

Tobey Maguire has a tricky part as Nick, with lots of standing around observing (in that sweltering hotel room argument between Gatsby and the Buchanans, Maguire doesn’t talk for about fifteen minutes); disappointingly, he veers like Gatsby’s yellow car between wide-eyed simpering and preppy angst, a graduate older cousin to his Spiderman. Oh, for a Tom Hiddleston or a Zachary Quinto! Joel Edgerton, on the other hand, is rather good as hulking, old-money bastard Tom Buchanan. He is a dreadful man – he cheats on his wife, hits his mistress, champions white supremacy at the dinner table – and yet I did feel ever so slightly sorry for him towards the end, only momentarily, because he is such an idiot, and this is down to Edgerton’s nuances. The moment he sees Daisy tell Gatsby he loves her, and Daisy’s unconvincing assertion that she never loved Tom, prompts a moment of poignant, primitive vulnerability (as the novel says, “there is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind”). It’s also the one moment I felt sorry for Daisy: it is too much to force her to declare that, because she loves Gatsby, she couldn’t have once loved anyone else. But once the Buchanans reunite, and use Gatsby's corpse as a rag to mop up their own misdeeds, they are odious. I also rather liked Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the oleaginous Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s business associate and the embodiment of Gatsby’s dodgy-dealing, behind-the-mask Mr Hyde.

Amongst all Lurhmann’s tricks and twists, there is an almost religious reverence for the book’s words: one senses that Lurhmann and co-writer Craig Pearce went through the novel with a big bright highlighter and wondered which lines could be chucked straight into the script and which could be amplified out of all recognition. Sassy aphorisms are transposed into dialogue (“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy”) while Lurhmann’s absolute faves are plucked and projected onto the screen in a jumble of typewritten letters. The poeticism works best at its most throwaway (“his mind would never romp again like the mind of God”), but the line about guests coming and going like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars collapses under the joint earnestness of the script and Tobey Maguire: he takes a deep breath, doesn’t quite get it out in one go, don’t worry, take a quick pause, have a think, another breath, another think, then deliver the line, there it is, the famous line. The book’s even more famous final line is smothered, too, in a fog of heavy-handed imagery and repetitions. Lurhmann also, inexplicably, butchers the opening line (hypocrite, Cripps!), removing the reference to Nick’s own advantages in life and the irony that material privilege (particularly in the case of Tom) is any sort of intellectual or emotional advantage. It is also telling which bits Lurhmann has left out. For instance, Gatsby’s funeral, a muted affair where Nick meets Gatsby's father, is arguably the most moving moment in the novel, and Lurhmann’s omission of it speaks volumes for his priorities.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway described F. Scott Fitzgerald as a talent “as natural as the pattern made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings”. One wonders whether Baz Lurhmann, whose last film was Australia, is deft and patient enough to capture his sense of that talent without daubing over it in glitter and glue. It is so hard to adapt a novel for the screen, and it is even harder to adapt a book as adored as The Great Gatsby, especially when it's been done four times already. Who is to say that Lurhmann’s interpretation of the novel is less true to Fitzgerald than mine or yours, or less effective. However, the best screen adaptations – A Clockwork Orange; Barry Lyndon; The Virgin Suicides; Submarine – tend to give the original an extra dimension and not for one second did I feel Lurhmann was expanding on the novel. Which is such a shame, because he certainly managed it with his feverish, blood-and-sand Romeo + Juliet. Like Daisy Buchanan, Lurhmann seems to prefer the grandiose gestures, melodramatic sweeps, roaring parties, flash clothes and Chanel advert stares-and-glances to the quieter, deeper moments of psychological insight.

I shall end, if you’ll permit me, with a line from Fitzgerald’s later novel Tender is the Night: “When I see a beautiful shell like that, I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it.” Inside Lurhmann’s Gatsby, for all its colour and kineticism, I fear there’s very little.