The Great Gatsby (2013)

Once in a while, if I'm feeling particularly morbid, I'll think of my own funeral--who would attend and what would they say about me? That's probably why I find The Great Gatsby to be such a depressing novel. Jay Gatsby was nothing but a sad, lonely man too stuck in the past to really live. And nobody bothered to attend his funeral.

I love The Great Gatsby (the book) for two main reasons. There are the feelings it so effectively evokes: the blind hope, the corrupted American dream, the friendless man with no one at his funeral. There is also the beautiful prose, which made the work a certifiable masterpiece. You have to wonder how a movie adaptation could possibly capture or even come close to capturing all the subtleties of the book. If the writing made The Great Gatsby so great, then how can that greatness be translated to the big screen, where no tangible words are available for full digestion by the audience? For this reason, it is easy to understand why so many film critics have unsurprisingly bashed the movie for its supposed lack of faithfulness to the great F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Really, what is an adaptation but a director's own reading of the book? It is Baz Luhrmann's job to interpret the text and it is our job to sit back and trust him. He does an incredible job of breathing life into the story and bringing it onscreen. The movie may have been substantially empty, but Baz does one hell of a job of making the film a pure visual feast (I would have expected nothing less from him). It is only with Baz's signature dramatic flourishes and over-the-top artistic details that the audience gets a feel of the frenetic, vibrant 1920s aura; sometimes the truth can only be revealed through exaggeration. Even the prose that defined The Great Gatsby's greatness is brought to life; chosen poetic quotes float across the screen in floral prints and cursive fonts and the tangibility of its language is very real.

There is almost too much going on within the film. We are so distracted by the millions of things thrown at us (quite literally in 3D), that we are given no time to really appreciate the message Fitzgerald wanted us to take from all of this. "Less is more" is a lesson that Baz has yet to learn--perhaps a more traditional adaptation at certain points of the film would have allowed the audience to appreciate his direction and Fitzgerald's original intent.

The casting is perfection. Leonardo DiCaprio nails his role as Gatsby right on the head. The anachronistic soundtrack makes the movie a little more relatable to the modern audience. The 1920s were a time of change and while jazz was new and unprecedented then, it certainly isn't now. There are a few ways Baz Luhrmann could have improved his adaptation of the book, but quite frankly, this movie is great as is. And as a personal, self-proclaimed avid fan of the book, that's saying a lot.