Review: Movie - The Great Gatsby - 2013
Almost true to source: Gatsby is visually stunning but emptiness prevails
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Ines Farag- 12:00 AM - 3 June 2013
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Ines FaragThe F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that every American high school student is required to read could not have been adapted by a more suitable director, which is the blessing and curse of this movie. Baz Luhrmann's signature note is one of flair and frenzied indulgence, and this story is all about 1920s "new money" and a fatalistic kind of grandeur, paired with the age-old American bootstrap promise of remaking the self from nothing. Visually, this is perfectly captured: there's a whole lot of...Read more gorgeous decadence and superficiality on screen, and a whole lot of emptiness in the characters. Leonardo DiCaprio is, as always, wonderful, bringing to life the full smoke-and-mirror seductiveness of Gatsby. What works here, no thanks to Luhrmann's style, are the dazzling party scenes and tableaus of cheap wealth and leisure: Gatsby showering Daisy in his silk shirts in a ticker-tape parade of fine material, drag racing hot cars from Long Island to the center of the metropolis (in 3D it's a dizzying set of sequences), but there's something ultimately missing. The viewer is left feeling the same emptiness that plagues the characters throughout the film's two and half hours at the end of it all. I defer to a sharper film critic, Richard Lawson, of the Atlantic for this something missing: "Where Fitzgerald gives us a lyrical condemnation of a society ravaged by materialism, Luhrmann has created an opulent, tragic Horatio Alger tale of lost love. The excesses of Roaring Twenties New York high society are certainly pooh-poohed in the film, but they are swaddled in so much visual pop and frenetic beauty that the criticism barely registers. Too enamored of its own decadence, The Great Gatsby says a lot without saying much of anything."
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