I walked out of Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of
The Great Gatsby an hour early. It may have gotten my $6.00, but I refused to let it claim another hour of my life. Perhaps you will say this disqualifies me from critiquing it, and if you feel that way you can quit reading now, but I think I saw enough to safely say that this film adaptation was one of the worst novel-to-screen attempts to ever attain world-wide distribution. For reference, I left just after the Gatsby/Daisy shirt scene, right after Nick Carraway said, "His name was really James Gatz."
Let's begin with the fact that I own the book, and can therefore read it at any time, and so when I go to see a film adaptation I expect something more than having the text of the novel read to me verbatim. But no. From the get-go we have Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway reading out the iconic first lines of the novel; "Ok," I thought, "These lines are iconic. Maybe the best way to start is the way the novel starts." Only, it didn't stop. It got worse. At some point, Carraway begins writing down the story of Gatsby, and then the filmmakers started superimposing his writing (verbatim from the text of the novel) over the images on the screen.
I can read this book at home! Moreover, I don't need you to voice-over me all of the prose, Nick Carraway, just let the actors do their job. I think Carey Mulligan (as Daisy Buchanan) can manage to convey that "five years of sadness were on her lips" when she starts crying over Gatsby's shirts seemingly inexplicably-- for God's sake, even Fitzgerald assumed his audience was smart enough to figure out why she started crying without having to write such an obvious thing.
The terribleness of it all really hit me as Leonardo DiCaprio (as Jay Gatsby) told his origin story to Nick Carraway in the new yellow car: the screenwriters barely changed a single word of dialogue from the novel, and Leo was definitely having trouble making the dialogue screenworthy. Don't get me wrong,
The Great Gatsby is a fantastic book, a true masterpiece, but it's a
novel. It is a masterpiece of the art form known as
novel. It's also a novel from the 1920s, and when you read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, etc., you find that they have to be a bit euphemistic/not straight-forward about things in a way that sounds a bit confusing to us in 2013. Throughout the film, no new dialogue was written. Instead, the lines came straight from the book. Screenwriters, it's your job to make these sometimes awkward sentences and phrases palatable to modern audiences. Also, lest we forget, Fitzgerald died in Hollywood a failed screenwriter. His words work well in a book, but not so well on the screen. A valiant experiment, Luhrmann, but an experiment that proved why Fitzgerald did not make it in Hollywood.
Speaking of the yellow car,
The Great Gatsby as novel is full of symbolism. In addition to the car, there are the green light, the eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg, East and West Eggs, and even-- believe it or not!--the characters themselves. Baz Luhrmann may be interested to know that symbolism works differently in different mediums: thus, just having Gatsby driving a yellow car, while incredibly true to the book, does not have the same gravitas in film as in a writing. Novels use words. Film uses things like shot composition, montage, cuts, and different filmic styles (which Luhrmann arguably tried and failed to do with so-called "original" footage that looked like something from 1960s Vietnam War news reels) to create meaning. It's as if Luhrmann thought he could just somehow straight up shoot the words of the novel and make everyone happy. The problem is, he's a filmmaker not a writer, and he has source material in front of him which he needed to take a step further-- to transform mediums, to create meaning, to realize that while the novel is a masterpiece, a film is an entirely different beast. Also, having Gatsby introduce himself with that cheesy face as the music swells and fireworks go off just felt forced. It made me laugh. Fitzgerald really did the introduction so much better in the novel-- that's one of the few moments Luhrmann
did change, sadly, and he shouldn't have changed it so drastically.
Unfortunately, I don't think Luhrmann
did understand his source material. While slavishly accurate in all superficial matters,
The Great Gatsby film failed to comprehend that Tom was not the villain of the piece and Daisy was not the victim of the piece. In fact, it was as if Luhrmann thought this was a straight-up tragic love story a la
Romeo and Juliet (...or
Moulin Rouge...) instead of a scathing critique of the wealthiest portions of society during the disillusioned years of the Jazz Age. It's as if everyone is having fun except Daisy, but only because Tom is cheating on her and she gave up being with Gatsby. No. Fitzgerald and his circle had just come out of World War I, and while there were some grainy shots that were clearly meant to look like "original" flashbacks to Gatsby in the war, Luhrmann seems to have failed to comprehend that World War I fundamentally changed Western society. One day everyone thinks the world is so civilized and the next an entire generation of men have been killed on the battlefields of Europe for absolutely no reason. They aren't alcoholics just because it was fun. They don't have mindless parties just because the money exists. They have lived through an earth-shaking crisis and come out broken on the other side.
Back to Daisy and Tom. They are not archetypes of bullying husband and simpering wife. They are symbols of the dissolution and corruption of wealth-- yes, both of them. Gatsby, too, in a sense. This is not a tragic love story. By making Tom an archetypical villain, you lose the critique of society at the core of the novel, and that core is what makes the novel a masterpiece. The center begins to unravel.
Additionally, while Luhrmann kept in the green light/yellow car/eyes billboard (though without seeming to understand their significance, only that they were a mandatory part of the story in terms of "accuracy"), at least within the first hour and a half of the two hour and twenty-three minute film-- and the correlating parts of the book-- he managed to cut some key foreshadowing and symbolism, like the car accident with the Owl Eyed man, who appeared only as a random character in one scene, instead of a pretty regular part of the Gatsby/Daisy house tour (and, I mean, Owl Eyes? Eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg? Come on.).
Beyond this, the film felt vaguely racist, too. I've noticed this trait within several of Baz's films. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, and I'm sure you could make other arguments, but he really exoticized the African-American body. As far as I can tell, this is not a prominent feature of the novel. Yes, Tom has a racist line (included verbatim in the film) about the the book 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' and how the dominant race (for Tom, white) needs to watch out, but it's like Luhrmann took that line and made the entire film a conduit for exotification. I'm not sure of his meaning. Yet, since none of the main characters of the novel are African-American, our only access to African-Americans in the film comes from short shots-- a muscular African-American man in the wasteland of ashes, Nick gets drunk in NYC and watches first a muscular African-American man playing the saxophone, then watches an African-American woman watching that man, then watches an African-American flapper dancing for a white man in a window. Later, as Nick and Gatsby drive across the bridge they pass a car of African-Americans-- several men and women, who are playing music and dancing provocatively as they cross the bridge. Nick regards them with what can only be called a leer-- I might term it "the white gaze" in a parallel to the well-known "male gaze." Then, at a speakeasy luncheon, all of the dancers in Vegas show-girl styled outfits are African-American women performing for an audience comprised primarily of white males. It felt not only out of place, but uncomfortable. For the record, that scene in the book
does not mention dancers of any kind, much less exoticized African-American dancers.
I felt like the only good part of the movie that I saw was Elizabeth Debicki playing Jordan Baker, who seemed to really get her part (except she was maybe a bit less detached than she ought to have been) and I think Carey Mulligan could have been good if they had let her
act as Daisy-- the character/symbol within the book-- instead of trumping her moments with explanatory voiceovers and forcing her to play the victimized wife.
Finally, the movie was poorly-paced, and a whopping two hours and twenty-three minutes. With all the previews I had to endure it would have been two hours and forty-three minutes. In all honesty, I probably could have reread the entire book in that time, and would have been much happier with that decision: three hours with a masterpiece versus three hours with a superficial pastiche. Luhrmann needed to create a film, to put a familiar story into a new medium and to put his own creative stamp upon it, not put (literally) old words on the screen.
The film did not convey the message/meaning of the book, nor did it
convey any other message. The film said nothing about anything, but not
in a meaningful
The Sun Also Rises way-- just nothing. Ultimately, I think I can sum up the 2013 film of
The Great Gatsby as follows: a slavish adaptation of the novel with neither comprehension of the intent of the source material
nor original creation. Without both/either of these elements, the film soundly fails.
EDIT: If it seems like I'm saying the movie was both too true to the book and not true to the book at all, I am. The film is like a parrot: you can teach a parrot to say a sentence. The parrot can mimic the sound of a human voice perfectly-- it seems like the exact same sentence. Yet, when the parrot says it, the sentence loses all context and feeling that made it worth saying in the first place.
