Gatsby (Leo Di Caprio) strolls into this film after half an hour with the air of a debonair, feckless gentleman who enjoys filling his house with partying bright young things. His world of West Egg is the area of new money, which is also inhabited by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) a stockbroker who struggles through his day job in the city only to fill his evenings chronicling the adventures of Gatsby and his pals.Across the bay, in old moneyed East Egg live Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Tom (Joel Edgerton), a couple who are seemingly perfect in their easy lifestyles, granted to them by the vast estate that Tom has inherited. And herein lies the tale - Gatsby is deeply in love with Daisy, a woman whom he once had an affair with as a younger man. Nick, as our narrator and cousin to Daisy, gradually reveals a tale of how unrequited love and greed can destroy even the most seemingly beautiful and powerful among us.
Gatsby's obsession with Daisy is memorably wrought in this adaptation and this is the strongest aspect of the film - how well it chronicles the flaws of male attitudes towards love. It shows that Gatsby ultimately has little consideration for anything else but his feelings for Daisy, not how she would react to them or how the opinion of any of his friends would be altered by his actions. The film is extremely sympathetic to Gatsby, far more so than the book and to some extent it skates over some of the more questionable aspects of the business practices that have made him a rich man.
Nick Carraway follows Gatsby in a kind of deep hypnosis and he is unusually docile in this version of the story. After all, it is Nick that ultimately reveals that whilst these people are beautiful on the surface, they are ugly in spirit. His narration seems to verge on praise of the excess and fecklessness that characterise Gatsby's life. This seems to miss F Scott Fitzgerald's point - Nick's role in the book is to satirise these characters, yet in this film, he seems to be an almost worshipful apprentice.
This ethereal feeling is enhanced by Baz Luhrmann's strange style of camera work, with shots that seem to linger on the female leads in particular. Daisy is subject to all kinds of odd lighting effects that make Carey Mulligan appear to be a creature from another planet. Again, this is probably designed to give us an impression o
f Gatsby's mind, but I couldn't help but think that this stylisation gave the film the feel of being a bit like a very stylish, very expensive chocolate advert.
By contrast, the men are portrayed in very stark terms, in particular mega-bastard Tom Buchanan, who is a cruel and harsh dictator to weak willed Daisy. It is hard to believe that Nick would ever have been friends with a man like Tom, but the film explains that Nick is too polite to end even the most illogical of friendships. What works is that Baz Luhrmann makes this believable and in the scenes that they share, the script is at its sharpest.
So, The Great Gatsby (2013) is ultimately a bit of a mixed bag - whilst the acting is excellent, it feels too safe and too sanitised to be a true telling of what is a timeless story.
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the photograph used on this blog and will remove it at the request of the rights holder.
