Last night I was in a packed cinema, staring up from one of the lower seats at a party which would rival anything a modern celebrity could put together. Glitter cannons in the shape of champagne bottles throwing sparkling confetti over everyone, people throwing themselves fully-clothed into the pool, everyone dancing the Charleston to remixed jazz - it's the classic scene where Nick Carraway first meets Gatsby, and it's one of the best things I've seen on the silver screen to date. Forget fight scenes, forget daring rooftop chases and steamy kisses; the highlight of Luhrmann's Gatsby is the fabulous backdrop of lavish, roaring twenties parties.
And in the middle of it all is Leonardo DiCaprio, smiling the perfect smile. It looks so effortless on screen, the glass in his hand fits perfectly, as though it's meant to be there; in his suit, the chunky ring on his finger, he looks so at home as the fireworks burst and the celebrations begin to wind down, at the centre of it all and yet walking through it like a ghost.
From there to the busy speakeasy under the barbershop in New York, everywhere there's a party it feels richer than anything you could indulge in here in the twenty-first century. The setting is almost a fairy tale, Gatsby's palatial house and brilliant gardens; the mystical, naturalistic cottage next door which belongs to Tobey Maguire's Carraway; The Buchanan's ice palace, a sterile mansion draped entirely in clean white; Luhrmann seems to try and create transparent heroes and villains. And yet...
"I don't want you to think I'm fake," Gatsby tells Nick all throughout the film. And yet it seems to do the very opposite for me, breaking down this whole image of Gatsby and turning him into the enemy. Maybe he is the villain, maybe I shouldn't like him. But as I recall, the book did the same. It always left me in some doubt as to whether Gatsby was truly the hero of the book, if there even was one.
But back to the movie. It's good, it's fun, it's entertaining. You get an atmosphere with the parties that you never felt with Fitzgerald's novel. But there are parts which don't feel quite right, they don't fit in entirely. The cutscenes with Nick talking to his psychiatrist seem to be a separate story, almost about the writing of the novel rather than part of the story itself, and they interrupt the plot for no very good reason. Some of Gatsby's speech seems forced, as though it could never be made to sound quite right - DiCaprio plays the gentleman very well, but it never suits the character of Gatsby all that well. His repetition of "Old Sport" feels out of place, just wrong. Daisy, the female lead, often feels two-dimensional, serving no other purpose than to be an ideal which even Gatsby can't reach. And it's one of the only movies in which I've started questioning plot holes before it's finished. In the end, Daisy's choice feels like the wrong one. Or is it supposed to? I have no idea how to read this movie? Am I supposed to feel like everything's turned out the wrong way, like Daisy and Gatsby should instead live happily ever after? I can't get my head around exactly how I should feel about that ending.
I can't say I'm surprised about that, though. The book itself isn't much for plot - it was required reading for me when I did English at A-level, and any book that's required reading isn't going to be read for the plot. It's about the problems with the American dream, and that's something which is very hard to put into film. Symbolism like that works better written on paper, even if it is less interesting.
And like I've said, I don't feel like it's Oscar bait. It feels too empty - there's very little to hold it all together. At the end of the day, all it really is is a buddy movie: Gatsby likes Nick's cousin, Daisy, and so he asks Nick to get the two of them together. This is the story, even if it does have an unhappy ending, and it isn't enough to hold two hours together.
You know what, though? I don't really care. Because with all the music, and the glitter, and the lavish parties, I came out of the cinema feeling like a million dollars myself. If you're not going to watch it for the plot, go watch it for the parties...
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