about Baz Luhrmann's film, "The Great Gatsby"

Seated in the theater tipping back Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby", you're hyperaware that what you're seeing is a theatrical production: super-sized CGI-powered stage props and back drops. This isn't a period piece depicting the Jazz Age so much as it is an indulgence of the Jazz Age of our imaginations. And, in a way, this is perfect; this is an ode to Gatsby, a man who has built his own life with stage sets born of his imagination.

The Great Gatsby--the movie and the man--is a big show.

But the film pays a cost here because The Great Gatsby the novel is also a story--a story with moments of candid intimacy, bared feelings, and things revealed. So the problem is, when those genuine moments come, the film can't stop putting on a show.

This film can't be the book. Maybe it didn't have to. Too bad it tried.


Notes:

• Even with this flaw (and it's not the only big flaw), I enjoyed the film a great deal.

• Going in, I estimated Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire should have switched roles; I traditionally think of DiCaprio as having an edge and Maguire as the more vulnerable and charming. But I was very wrong: DiCaprio is nearly flawless--everyone is.

the closing passage of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.