Trailers: The Great Gatsby

      

     Just saw the trailer for the new The Great Gatsby adaptation and dear God in Heaven it looks bad! Laughably, mind-numbingly bad. It looks so unspeakably, maniacally misconceived that I hardly know where to begin.

            Well, let’s start with the cast: Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the titular Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchannan.

First of all, who the heck cast Tobey Maguire as Nick? That’s just…wrong. Nick, as the book’s narrator, is the story’s moral center: the one genuinely decent person in Gatsby’s tragic life, and the sensible, observant eye-of-the-storm. Maguire can certainly be likeable, but in a rather dorky, boy-next-door kind of way rather than an intelligent, morally solid kind of way. In what’s supposed to be a roaring-twenties society party, Maguire looks like a time-travelling 90’s teenager who snuck in through the back door (shades of Shia LaBouf in The Greatest Game Ever Played, except that here it’s not intentional). To put it bluntly, they cast an actor who has absolutely no sense of maturity about him as the only mature character in the story. Hearing him say, “who is this ‘Gatsby’?” in his nasally, I-didn’t-quite-make-it-through-puberty voice is enough to make me laugh. 

DiCaprio isn’t as horrendously miscast as Maguire, but from what we see of his performance he’s almost even more of a misfire. For instance, in a conversation with Daisy he looks less like a man talking to the love of his life and more like a man who really needs to eat more fiber, if you get my drift. Frankly, I think he would have been a better choice for Nick, and, I don’t know, someone else could have taken Gatsby.

Mulligan looks incredibly vapid and blank as Daisy, though whether that’s the performance or the character is, admittedly, hard to tell at this point. Still, even Daisy ought to change her expression sometimes…

Then there’s the whole look and style of the film, which is bright, artsy, artificial, and nauseatingly self-indulgent. This doesn’t look like the Jazz Age, this looks like a 90’s music video with lasers and weird camera angles.  It’s like the director (Baz Luhrman) wants to remind the audience every second of the film that he is an artist and a bold, visionary director. The result it looks like Las Vegas threw up on Fitzgerald’s novel. The computer-generated 300-style look of the whole thing fits in with Fitzgerald about as well as an extended rap number would fit in with Charles Dickens.

Which brings me to the soundtrack, which is so aggressively non-1920s in style that it makes me wonder if the whole thing was meant as a parody. We get a kind of pseudo-rap type thing in the opening, then a mewling pop ballad for the second half. Each one says “Fitzgerald’s jazz age!” about as much as an iPod.            

The Great Gatsby is a really wonderful book, all about pride, vanity, passion, unworthy love, and genuine friendship. Its overwhelming feelings are of sadness, longing, and despair, with brilliant flashes of genuine human kindness. This latest adaptation, apparently, is all about “look what a brilliant, bold artist Baz Luhrman is!”