THE GREAT GATSBY
The Roaring 20s have never looked better, but Baz Luhrmann’s film of the classic novel is as shallow as spilt champagne
DOES Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyant new film of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic (with Carey Mulligan, right) capture the brilliance of the novel? Some call it a triumph, but others say it could be the most expensive flop of the year.
BAZ LUHRMANN was precisely the wrong director to shoot F. Scott Fitzgerald’s small but perfectly formed American novel. With the opposite of the Midas touch, he has transformed a book of class, subtlety and sophistication into a frenzied folly, with the heartfelt emotion of a Las Vegas floorshow. Luhrmann lovingly titivates the fake and superficial, and never gets round to serving the meat of the novel, which involves cutting into sham and heartlessness.
It’s not all terrible. Luhrmann is in his element at Long Island parties of the Roaring Twenties, and invests them with glitz, glamour and more than a hint of decadence. He and his designer wife, Catherine Martin, are connoisseurs of kitsch.
It’s too bad he is tone-deaf when dealing with nuanced human emotions or tragedy. Too much of the film goes for over-the-top, operatic effect when it needs to go for the intimate. The actors pose like models for a fashion spread. They are, of course, beautifully lit. What’s missing is the light behind their eyes. Luhrmann’s flamboyantly anachronistic style used pop music to energise Willi am Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet and 19th-century Paris in Moulin Rouge. The musical choices here — by Luhrmann himself and rapper Jay-Z — don’t work. The incorporation of modern hip-hop undermines the sense of period and distances the audience.
Luhrmann does understand the book intellectually and brings out its themes. He even addresses the central problem of dramatising the novel — it lacks a hero — by trying to turn it into a rites-of-passage for the author/ narrator. Luhr mann has invented a framing device to top and tail the film. In this, Nick Carraway ( To bey Maguire), a depressed, middleaged alcoholic in a sanatorium (like Fitzgerald towards the end of his life) is encouraged by his therapist to write a book about his memories of the Twenties.
These centre on Nick’s mysterious neighbour on Long Island. Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) throws enormous parties in a vast castle, but no one is sure how he’s made his fortune or where he comes from.
Gatsby befriends Nick, who is flattered even when he discovers that the millionaire has an ulterior motive: he wishes to get back together with Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a society beauty Gatsby loved before the war.
She didn’t wait for him and married America’s richest bachelor, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a polo-playing bully, boor and bigot, who fathered her daughter and now plays around with other women, especially a local garage owner’s promiscuous wife (Isla Fisher).
Nick is lured into the upperclass milieu, only to become disenchanted by its lack of any emotions higher than lust and greed. Unlike Gatsby, he eventually realises that Daisy is as careless and materialistic as her husband.
By t he e nd, we’re meant to feel, as Nick does, that Gatsby had ‘an extraordinary gift for hope’ and felt more deeply than any of his contemporaries. DiCaprio certainly discovers Gatsby’s glamour, vulnerability and ruthlessness, but he’s as deep as spilt champagne. It’s hard to share his passion for Daisy or believe that his romantic tactics will achieve anything but failure.
This is partly because Carey Mulligan — a clever and talented young actress — never quite entrances as Daisy. Submerged beneath over-the-top art direction and subdued by Edgerton’s bludgeoning performance as her spouse, she is little more than a pretty girl with an attractive nose.
The absence of any feeling for her small daughter — a lack of responsibility equally manifest in her two beaux — makes her
superficial from the outset. When her vacuity is brutally exposed in the final act, it comes as no surprise.
The reason the film has never been a hit despite being filmed six times is that it lacks any character to feel deeply about.
Nick is annoyingly passive, a hollow man — an onlooker, not a protagonist — and an off-form Tobey Maguire makes him an opaque, uncharismatic and unobservant cipher. Daisy’s a spoiled little rich girl. Gatsby’s charismatic but delusional. In a novel, the reader can imagine himself as Nick and be fascinated by the wealth of Gatsby, the allure of Daisy. On screen, that is more difficult to bring off. No one has managed it yet.
I was a fan of Luhrmann’s early work — Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge. I was even entertained by Australia, his overblown tribute to Gone With The Wind and his own home nation.
He is never boring, and there’s no doubt about his intelligence and flair. There is, however, a gigantic question mark hanging over his taste.
One is left with the horrible suspicion that Luhrmann’s remake of The King’s Speech would involve fire-breathing jugglers, a thousand screaming drag queens and a million rampaging wildebeest.
SOMALI pirates take over a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. But they have reckoned without the ship’s cook. He proceeds to slaughter them one by one with a variety of kitchen utensils.
Well, that’s the way Hollywood would have told the story of A Hijacking. Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm, who penned the excellent TV series Borgen, has other ideas. His shipboard cook, played by Pilou Asbaek (the spin doctor in Borgen) is simply concerned with survival. And he gets terribly depressed when he can’t wash.
The major protagonist is the CEO of the ship-owning company, played by Soren Malling (who was the head of TV news in Borgen and Sarah Lund’s doomed sidekick in The Killing). He’s i nterested in bringing his crew home safely at the least possible cost.
The drama that unfolds is suspenseful, enthralling and realistic.
Audiences reared on American action movies may find it slow and lacking in thrills, but anyone i nterested i n how negotiations are really conducted will find this film a rewarding experience.
It’s all the more nightmarish for feeling authentic.