A Gilded Romance: Baz Luhrmann unveils his visionary take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby
By Ian Haydn Smith
The match of F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of ‘The Great Gatsby’, and Baz Luhrmann, whose baroque fantasies conjure up vivid portraits of wild lives and doomed love, is one so perfect it begs the question why it has taken so long to materialise. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a director better suited to take on Fitzgerald’s fable of dashed dreams – the cocktail of hedonism and despair is one Luhrmann is familiar with. Like Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece, his films balance dazzling pyrotechnics with a dark undertow.
‘The Great Gatsby’ is the defining account of the Jazz Age – the period between the return of soldiers to the US at the end of the First World War and the collapse of the world’s economy following the Wall Street Crash. Yet for all its sybaritic qualities, it is not a wholly joyous read. Fitzgerald may seduce us with the extravagance of life on Long Island, as witnessed by his alter ego Nick Carraway, but an air of menace lingers. Nick finds himself drawn towards his mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby. Rumour has it Gatsby is a bootlegger, a gunrunner, a kingpin, a spy. He hosts magnificent parties yet his presence at them is peripheral. Nick integrates himself into Gatsby’s inner circle, discovering the man behind the myth and the past that haunts him.
Fitzgerald saw the Jazz Age as an era that had consumed itself almost as soon as it had begun. Like the champagne devoured by the gallon at Gatsby’s parties, it would soon fizzle out, leaving those who lived through it with little more than a foggy memory of what had passed. Fitzgerald was both a symbol of the times and the perfect example of the generation’s contradictions. “Fitzgerald is,” as his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson described, “romantic, but also cynical; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has the Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.”
Such contradictions have long held a fascination for Lurhmann. Strictly Ballroom (1992) pitched the Rococo fashions of ballroom dancing against the banality of suburban Australian life; Romeo + Juliet (1996) bolted between fantastic parties and street battles; and Moulin Rouge (2001) indulged in a celebration of the excesses of early 20th-century Parisian life whilst recording the slow demise of its most alluring star.
The Great Gatsby reunites Luhrmann with Leonardo DiCaprio, a very different actor from the one who played Romeo. However, as his recent performance in Django Unchained proved, DiCaprio has the range to play Gatsby’s multi-faceted personality. Likewise, Tobey Maguire is the perfect Nick Carraway. He excelled in a similar role as the narrator of The Ice Storm (1997), who was also a frustrated observer longing to be at the centre of the party but is never quite at ease with himself in order to let go. However, Luhrmann’s choice of Carey Mulligan to play Daisy Buchanan will be, for some, the director’s most divisive casting. Certainly the novel’s most ambiguous character, like Scarlett O’Hara, Daisy is so famous a literary creation that everyone has their own idea of what she should be like.
There have been two previous film adaptations of ‘The Great Gatsby’. The 1974 version, directed by Jack Clayton, is all soft focus and lens gels. Even further back is Elliott Nugent’s 1949 production. However, both films deal almost exclusively with the central romance, eschewing Fitzgerald’s critique of the era. (Roger Ebert wrote of Clayton’s version that it would take “the same time to read Fitzgerald’s novel as to view this movie – and that’s what I’d recommend”.) Neither film employed his crackling prose or the dialogue that came straight out of tabloid journalism, albeit peppered with the author’s legendary wit. This new version, with its soundtrack produced by Jay-Z, faces the challenge of capturing the essence of Fitzgerald’s world of excess and decay, appealing to contemporary tastes and, like the novel, finding favour with future generations.
With thanks to Curzon Cinemas
The Great Gatsby opens on Fri 17 May