The Great Gatsby

It must have been a giant pain in the ass to clean all of that confetti out of the pool.

I have a bad habit of putting things off until the last minute.  I finished Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's* novel, which was great, about half an hour before we left for the theater to see Baz Luhrmann's new movie of the same name.

If you haven't read the book, it's about a rich guy named Gatsby who is in love with a woman named Daisy, who unfortunately is already married to another rich guy named Tom, who is an asshole.  Gatsby has a mysterious past full of secrets.  Women frequently resemble flowers.  Expensive cars are driven very fast.  Jazz is played.  Adultery is committed.  Alcohol is consumed in great quantity.  No spoilers here but... things probably aren't going to end well.

I was afraid that the movie would be disappointingly different from the book.  Instead, it was disappointingly... similar.  Luhrmann's faithful and abiding love for Fitzgerald's text is kind of the worst thing about this movie.  It was as if he took a Word file of the novel, chopped out everything that wasn't dialogue and emailed it to his gigantic and well-funded design team, then handed the dialogue to his actors and said, "say this."

A notable addition to this film version is a frame story in which Tobey Maguire's Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, has ended up in a sanitarium because he drinks too much.  While there, he has a series of conversations with his psychiatrist in which he relates the wild, tragic tale of Jay Gatsby, which gives Luhrmann the opportunity to take whole pages of the novel, insert the words, "and you see, doctor..." and then make Tobey Maguire say them.  Then, the psychiatrist is all like, "maybe you should be writing this down," so Tobey Maguire starts writing down the words of the book and they float magically off the page and hover on the screen as you see him writing and hear him say the very same words in voiceover.  And then he gets a typewriter, so his magical floating words can be typewritten.  All this because for some reason a film audience cannot be expected to accept the fact that the story has a fucking narrator.

Seriously, Baz Luhrmann, we know what a narrator is.  You don't have to find some elaborate excuse to have him tell the whole story to a character whose only function is to be a proxy for the audience and who only ever says things like, "tell me more about that."  We, the audience, do not need a proxy.  We are right here in the theater eating popcorn and drinking Dr. Pepper.

Anyway, in another departure from the original text, Luhrmann made the choice to score the film not exclusively with Jazz, but also with modern music, including hip-hop.  I actually kind of liked it.

Also, old sport, there are some phrases and images that are repeated over and over again in the book, thereby creating a pleasing rhythm on the page.  When lifted out of 140 pages of text and shoehorned into 143 minutes of film, these repeated phrases and images become a bit... repetitive.  If you go and see this movie, by the end of it you will probably be very very tired of the Big Staring Billboard Eyes and the Extremely Significant Green Light.

So should you go see it?  Well, it's a beautiful looking movie with fantastic actors in it.  There are some lovely, painterly visions of New York City in the 1920's, there are lots of nice pieces of Arts and Crafts furniture, there's a fantastic garment that looks like a dress and a chandelier had a baby, and there are whimsical floating inflatable zebras in the swimming pool.  It's a bit too much like a staged reading of the novel, but the novel is good.  I had mixed feelings.  As we were leaving the theater, I asked my boyfriend what he thought, and he said: "it was beautiful and masturbatory and I couldn't wait for it to be over.  Not enough that I wanted to leave, but enough to sort of give me an anxiety attack."


*This is totally F. Scott Fitzgerald's full name.  Apparently the guy who wrote the Star Spangled Banner was his second cousin three times removed or something.