The not so Great Gatsby

There’s a moment in The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s eponymous hero reveals that he spends money and throws lavish parties to cover up his own emptiness. The same could be said for Baz Luhrmann’s film. It’s ironic that a movie about the dangers of flamboyant excess would so thoroughly indulge in such flamboyant excess. “But the story is all about excess, so Luhrmann is smart to employ such excess,” I hear you retort. True, but the story is also about characters, and they are sadly lacking in this adaptation. For all his visual splendour and loud music, Luhrmann has neglected character and substance, leaving the film feeling as empty as Gatsby himself.

These don’t feel like complex characters, but broad caricatures that often verge on the cartoonish. Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is basically a moustache-twirling villain and it’s never entirely clear what’s so great about Gatsby anyway. DiCaprio has a distracting habit of dropping his Ts, so he keeps calling people “old spore.” Tobey Maguire is predictably uninteresting as Nick Carraway, a character about whom we learn disappointingly little. As for the usually excellent Carey Mulligan, here she is reduced to the role of the vacuous love interest whose shrillness is matched only by her whininess. Why are these men falling so desperately in love with such an aloof, irritating non-person? You’d be better off dating a cat in a dress.

All this is clearly of little concern to Luhrmann, who is much more interested in his lavish visual effects and obtrusive pop music. The problem with the soundtrack is not that it’s modern, but that it’s just not very good. By all means use modern music, just don’t make it Lana Del Ray. Or Florence + The Machine. Or Emeli Sandé. The result is something that looks more like a music video than a literary adaptation and Luhrmann’s use of 3D makes it obvious that he prioritises spectacle over anything else. Don’t make a literary adaptation in 3D. You’re not Ang Lee. You’re Baz Luhrmann. The camera barely stays still for long enough to capture anything substantial, and just as we think we’re getting somewhere interesting we’re pulled right out of it by some gaudy slow motion or some loud will.i.am.

To give Luhrmann his dues, the film is hypnotic and the storytelling solid. But The Great Gatsby is a classic case of style over substance, the kind of which we’ve come to expect from Baz Luhrmann who seems like a child in a candy store, over-indulging in brightly coloured sugary treats. The film fails to heed the warnings of its own story, and goes lavishly over the top at the expense of humanity and emotion. You certainly don’t come away from The Great Gatsby feeling like it’s adapted from one of the best novels of all time. Which it apparently is but I don’t know, I’ve not read it.