Review: The Great Gatsby - Montreal Gazette

The Great Gatsby

Rating: 3 out of 5

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Tobey Maguire

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

Running time: 143 minutes

Parental guidance: Adult themes

Playing at: Angrignon, Brossard, Cavendish, Colossus, C?te des Neiges, Forum, Kirkland, Lacordaire, March? Central, Sources, Sph?retech, Taschereau cinemas.

In English with French subtitles at Cin?ma du Parc

No one has ever accused director Baz Luhrmann of modest ambitions, and it's not hard to see what he's trying to do in his kaleidoscopic, all-glam version of The Great Gatsby.

The set design alone - fireworks exploding in the sky above immense mansions filled with dancing mobs in tuxedos and gowns, while the band, sporting white derby hats, plays in stylized syncopation - piles the glitz so high that you can barely see F. Scott Fitzgerald peeking out from behind the rock gardens. This Gatsby isn't great: He's fabulous.

Not that there is nothing to admire. Fitzgerald's 1925 novel was a jazz age fever dream, a mysterious story of obsession in which a poor man, born James Gatz, reinvents himself as the hugely wealthy Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and buys a Long Island home across the bay from his lost love, the perky Daisy (Carey Mulligan.)

There he pines for her, surrounded by the gangsters, Wall Street investors, crooked politicians and slinky hangers-on of the era, or at least of Fitzgerald's imagination.

The story is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), Daisy's cousin, who has rented a small place next to Gatsby's and becomes their go-between. In the film, he's a ruined alcoholic writing his memoirs, and Luhrmann shows his fealty to the printed word by having letters float through the air in rich, if totally unnecessary, 3D. It's not literature exactly, but it's visual style that passes for it.

Gatsby is just a rumour in the first part of the story, a man of mystery whom people are talking about. Someone says he's related to the Ger-man ruler Kaiser Wilhelm, but he seems more like Keyser Soze, a dark and mythic presence.

When he is introduced, we see DiCaprio in close-up, smiling into the camera with stars twinkling in the heavens behind him. With his broad, confident grin, he's reminiscent of no one as much as Charles Foster Kane, the reinvented dreamer of another, more coherent, American myth, and a hero also obsessed with the past. "Daisy" is just another way of saying "Rosebud."

She's just as elusive. Gatsby and Daisy fell in love years earlier when Gatsby was a soldier, but after he went to war, she married Tom Buchanan, an arrogant polo player with old money, in contrast to Gatsby's nouveau vulgarity.

Buchanan is played by Australian actor Joel Edgerton with a nice edge of bluff athletic entitlement. It's one of the few performances in the film that touches down into a recognizable reality, although occasionally the design and the story meld perfectly: Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan, one of Daisy's friends, looks like a walking piece of art deco sculpture.

The rest is some two-and-a-half hours of gorgeous costumes, incipient alcoholism, heightened re-creations of Old New York and a beautiful yellow Duesenberg that Gatsby drives to and from the city, orchestrated to a soundtrack that melds Jay-Z, Beyonc? and Gershwin. His route takes him past the bleak coalfields where workers slave - in carefully designed silhouette - under the watchful eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, a billboard that represents an all-seeing God.

It's a haunting symbol in the book but just another bit of production value in the film: This Gatsby doesn't so much build to a dark revenge as drag its artfully bloated glamour to the far end of the bay.

At its heart, though, there is a ticking life.

DiCaprio has a slick charm, even if his catchphrase, "old sport," sometimes comes out as "old spore" in his attempt at an Oxford accent. Mulligan is good, but she is too soulful an actress to capture Daisy's essential shallowness. Fitzgerald wrote that Daisy's voice is full of money: The line is missing in the movie, probably because Mulligan's voice is full of everything but.

You don't have to go far to find it, though. It's in every frame of this film.

Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Review+Great+Gatsby/8364323/story.html

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