The Great Gatsby: Operatic And Wistful

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The wasteful, dissolute parties where in “blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

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Fireworks over the bay. A cavernous house overrun with hysterical guests none of whom know the host.

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The ceaselessly vacuous discourses of , “the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

And the “romantic readiness” of a man who thought he could fix the past but in hindsight could not even repair a clock he had broken in a fit of anxiety.

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Yes, Baz Luhrmann gets it. He gets the seminal moments that anoint Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as one of the most perfect books ever written. One of the most stirring stories ever told. He gets a story that captures in about 145 pages, the rudderless, hedonistic, ruthlessly self-absorbed and yet seductively glamorous 1920s in New York and also many lives linked together by an impossibly idealistic love, mindless lust, a careless accident and a murder.

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For those who have loved the book with a passion,  the fear was always that Baz Luhrmann’s capable but  frighteningly mercurial instincts would reduce the emotional core of the book into a stunning spectacle. And how can anyone do justice to Fitzgerald’s glittering prose that without a trace of sentimentality, leaves your heart pierced and bloody at the end?

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But the opening scene of the green light at the dock tells you instantly that Luhrmann has found the keynote of the book.  And the” tuning fork that had been struck upon a star” when Gatsby first fell in love.

And then he also goes on to paint the glitter, the many big voids that Gatsby filled with rainbow fantasies to recreate himself from a man without a name to the man who had as much wealth as God. And yet who remained lonely and empty because, ““No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

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The line does’t make it to the film like many others but its meaning does and even as Luhrmann shows us the  mansions, the orchestrated and yet wildly messy lives of the rich and creates set pieces to celebrate music, choreography, the glossy loops of Jazz, yellow windows filled with human stories, the wasteland of a city watched over by the ever seeing eyes of an oculist on a faded billboard, he doesn’t forget that this is a book that cannot be messed around with and so he pays a larger-than-life tribute to Fitzgerald by turning Nick Carraway into a writer whose words leap out from the pages they are typed on and then crowd the screen and our senses as if to say, “That is what this story is about. Words. And the magic they create.”

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That said, Luhrmann is a showman, a magician of imagery much like Fitzgerald himself. Watch the introduction scene of Gatsby when Leonardo DiCaprio turns to meet our gaze and fireworks explode behind him. Or when we first see Carey Mulligan’s Daisy in a room full of breezy drapes, trying to find her bearings. Or the sickening aftermath of the parties Gatsby throws. Empty bottles being fished out of the pool. Disorientated guests leaving, still as spent and as empty as when they first wandered in.

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Or the scene where Gatsby and Daisy meet after five years in Nick Carraway’s (Tobey Maguire) cottage surrounded by flowers, lemon cakes and rain.

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Or the accident when Myrtle (Isla Fisher) runs to meet a speeding yellow car and is tossed in the air and is suspended in a shower of broken glass and pearls and perhaps dreams.

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Or that scene in Myrtle’s apartment where Nick discovers he is always going to be ‘within’ and ‘without’ watching the stories of these heedless men and women.

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This film is as much a sweeping visual feast as it is a story beautifully and emotionally narrated for a generation that cannot relate to Devdas or endless love but yes, will find itself being torn out of cynicism to connect with a character who despite all his lies had the idealism of a child who has not yet been hurt and believes he can do anything.

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DiCaprio is golden warm like sunshine and cleanses every frame he is in. AB saunters in and out, making you long for a Hollywood film that will make the world see what we see in him.  Maguire is sensitive to every line, every moment he is given to play with.

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Joel Edgerton as the insufferable Tom Buchanan packs in fine nuances in a broadly sketched character.  The weak link is Carey Mulligan who is not anywhere close to the ethereal Daisy. The object of deathless passion, one whose voice jingled with money and who (we were asked to believe),  evoked a “lingering regret” in the rays of the sun when they left her face much like children who have to leave a “pleasant street at dusk.”  This Daisy is unforgivably charmless, waxen almost, lifeless, without any of the animated beauty the book’s heroine had, atleast on the surface. Her eyes are empty as well and there is no tangible chemistry between her and DiCaprio.

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The styling of the film, the  detailing of the period it is set in is painstaking. Simon Duggan’s cinematography hurtles across the three dimensional pomp of a city drunk on its own excess, across the haunting valley of ashes,  fevered romance,  lives smashed and then lingers in the end..upon one life that remained unlived and was abandoned much like the pool in Gatsby’s mansion, emptied out of everything except leaves left behind by autumn and a love too great to be true.

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Watch this one if you loved the book or if you just want a film to be more than just an evening well spent. If you want a film to be an experience that can be overwhelming and visually operatic one instant and wistful in the next and will make you long like Gatsby for “an orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” A future that no matter how hard we beat against the current, brings us back, “ceaselessly into the past.”

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