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!”
