The Great Gatsby

With the holidays behind us we can re-start our Film Club screenings.

Our first film for 2014, in an attempt to pull in the punters, is The Great Gatsby.  It's been a bit of a struggle to produce the notes as I'm still getting used to the alarm clock in the morning, but I've just finished them and here thay are:

The Great Gatsby
USA 2013                    143 minutes

Director:                      Baz Luhrmann

Starring:                        Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire

“So what of this 3D fourth screen version of The Great Gatsby?  It is, you might say, a story of three eggs.  The mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their mansions.  Across the bay at East Egg are the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the First World War.  After losing her to Buchanan because he was penniless, he now seeks to recapture her.  The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture. Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by Michael Winner.”

 

Philip French

Awards and Nominations

• 11 wins
• 30 nominations

Despite the title, the film’s main character is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who is the unreliable narrator of Fitzgerald’s source novel as well as the catalyst who brings the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) together again.  The film follows the structure of the novel by having Carraway as the narrator, but anchors it in reality by making him tell it in flashback as part of his treatment for depression and alcoholism just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.  Luhrmann emphasis this literary conceit by makings words from the book float in the air around Carraway with some lines from the novel actually written on the camera lens.

 Many critics praised DiCaprio’s central performance as the millionaire bootlegger and some praised the vibrant energy of Luhrmann’s production, but as Scott Foundas pointed out in Variety:

“...what Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that Fitzgerald... was offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American empire, not an initiation to the ball.”

With the sound track of the film Luhrmann follows the precedent that he set on Moulin Rouge in using deliberately anachronistic songs which nonetheless help to build up the atmosphere of the Jazz Age.  But Philip French notes several less obvious anachronisms in other details of the production:  it is unlikely that Nick could have read Ulysses while still at Yale as it was only published in Paris in 1922 while Rhapsody in Blue is performed at one of Gatsby’s parties two years before Gershwin wrote it.

The Great Gatsby has been adapted for the screen six times.  These include a silent version (now lost) and a 1949 adaptation that starred Alan Ladd as Gatsby as well as the more famous 1974 version (from a script by Francis Ford Coppola) that starred Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway.  Additionally it has inspired ballets, musicals as well as several stage adaptations, including one in which the cast performed the full text of the novel in a production that lasted over eight hours.

 

Here's the trailer: