the Dalaverse

Taking a break from Trek-brain, as I want to get my thoughts on "The Great Gatsby" down while I still remember them (unlike everything else I've told myself I'll post about in oh, the last two years or so). My one-word review is "frustrating," and here's what I meant.

Some backstory first. I generally refer to Gatsby as my favorite novel, although I hadn't read it since high school. Being a literary-minded person, I found something of value in just about everything we read in school (except for A Farewell To Arms, Walden, and A Lesson Before Dying - those guys can fuck right off). But something about Gatsby struck me hard. I think it was a combination of the language hitting my buttons -- not long ago I found an 11th grade English notebook where I had just copied out passages and left exclamation points -- and the subject matter. To cut a very long story short I've always had hang-ups about money, and seeing all that opulent wealth portrayed as shallow and empty was a balm to my teenage soul. Or something. Honestly, I think I hadn't read it in the past ten years because I was afraid it wouldn't hold up to my memories, because who doesn't hate it when that happens? I'll never read Catcher In the Rye again because I managed to hit the seventeen-year-old window and now it's closed. But I did reread it a couple of days before I saw the movie. It wasn't as profound as when it was new to me, maybe, but I did still get a lot out of it, and it was farm-fresh in my mind when I walked into the theater.

I actually walked out of the theater two hours later thinking I mostly liked it with only minor quibbles. It took about a day before I worked out that no, I could not endorse it as a film, and why. It's not bad in the simple way that "Oz the Great and Powerful," to use a recent example, is bad. The source of my frustration is that Baz Luhrmann got a lot right and his style really suited the story...up until he botched the ending and revealed that he'd kind of misread the novel.


The thing that worked best for me: the overall atmosphere of the film in all its colorful, over-the-top glory. The lavish costumes, anachronistic music, CGI-d sets, and frenetic camerawork with lots of dramatic zoom shots; I knew all that was coming, having seen a Luhrmann film ever (confession: I was actually obsessed with "Romeo + Juliet" when it came out. I read the play like 20 times and memorized huge chunks of it and I can still recite the chorus in one breath). When he took on the project I had the dilemma of being a casual Baz fan but feeling very protective about him making that particular book. But his style isn't the problem, IMO. I didn't even mind the superfluous but characteristic framing device.

The cast is mostly great. Tobey Maguire was born to play Nick Carraway; he does the within/without thing so well, walking the line between Nick's naivete and the world-weary tone that creeps into his narration (except for ruining the perfect cadence of the last line by inserting pauses around "ceaselessly," but that is literally my only complaint about his performance). Joel Edgerton and Carey Mulligan are also very good, despite how I feel about the writing of Tom and Daisy which I'll get to in a moment. The only one who doesn't work for me is Leo. On paper he seems like a great Gatsby (sorry, I couldn't resist). But there are two issues here. One, his magical anti-aging powers ran out several years ago so he comes off as too old for the role. He's still very handsome but I honestly thought he was older than his actual 39, and Gatsby is supposed to be 32, and he's very clearly wearing a ton of makeup to look that age. Everybody is too old for their roles, I know that's Hollywood's way, but Carey and Tobey are believable as five years younger (Joel is stretching it a tad but the beard helps). He's a handsome dude, I'm not saying he isn't, but he looks so much older than Carey Mulligan in their love scenes that it's distracting.

He can't help that, of course. What he can help is playing Gatsby too intensely, a bit like he's on the verge of a breakdown the entire time. I kept seeing only the gangster Gatsby, and to me not pulling off the (sad and pathetic, but not self-aware) dreamer side of Gatsby dampens the tragedy of his demise.

I guess that leads me into the movie's greatest flaws. It's very faithful for the first half, which is why I was liking it so much. When the film left out Gatsby's father attending his funeral is where I started thinking that something had gone wrong. The thing is, Mr. Gatz is the greatest tragedy in the novel. He shows up with his illusions about his son, in his cheap coat with the picture of the house "Jimmy" sent him, and the book he shows Nick with young Gatsby's Schedule and General Resolves. No wasting time at Shafters...No more smokeing or chewing, Bath every other day, Read One improving book or magazine per week, Save $5.00 $3.00 per week, Be better to parents...He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.

Lots of lines from this book are better known but this -- this part breaks my heart. Everything the novel is saying is in there: the futility of Gatsby's dreams, the broken hopes and shaking hands of his father's generation and everyone who didn't make it out (for any value of 'making it'), Nick's pity and thinly-veiled (benign, from his point of view, but still) contempt. The contrast with Wolfsheim and Klipspringer makes it all the more tragic. When the movie left this out after it had been so faithful up to that point, it lost me.

Then I started going back to what else went wrong in the second half. I think it starts with the tail end of Gatsby and Daisy's first meeting again, which is much more elaborate than it is in the book. That didn't bother me at the time, but now I can see it's where the movie becomes about a Tragic Romance instead of the American dream and the loss of innocence after the Great War. In the movie, Daisy is genuinely torn between Gatsby and her comfortable life. She seems to be swaying toward Gatsby until he displays violence at the hotel room, at which point she changes her mind. Luhrmann reinforces this when we see her consider calling Gatsby just before he dies and again when she hesitates upon leaving town, with Tom shaking his head at her when Nick calls.

That might be romantic, but it's wrong. There's a reason we don't see Daisy again after Gatsby's death, and it's because she never intended to leave. It was a dalliance from her boring, safe, comfortable life; she didn't change her mind at the hotel because she'd never made it up in the first place, she was only agitated because she was being forced to confront this truth (never mind that they somehow turned 'Gatsby getting a subtle look on his face like you suddenly believe he'd killed a man' into 'grabbing Tom [who we just saw beat a women an hour ago btw] and screaming in his face.' This is what I mean when I say Leo played the gangster too broadly).

By focusing on the romance and playing it out this way, Luhrmann isn't just limiting the scope of Fitzgerald's novel. He's also revoking Daisy's agency. Look, I think Fitzgerald does have some sympathy for Daisy given the environment she grew up in and the limitations it places on her, but he doesn't let her off the hook either. Take this passage when Nick glimpses Daisy and Tom through the window: They weren't happy...and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

Or one of the most poetic and famous lines: They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made... Luhrmann actually uses that line in Nick's narration - or rather misuses it, because he ends it at "vast carelessness." You don't get "kept them together," you don't get "Daisy AND Tom"; you get Tom controlling Daisy, making that choice for her. It takes away her agency and it turns her into a tragic figure that she simply isn't because she and Tom are both horrible people. Ironically, the contemporary interpretation of Daisy comes off as more sexist than her '20s origin.

Thus endeth my Daisy Buchanan feels.

Oh god, I've written a whole essay here, what else? A reason I thought it was heading in the right direction at the beginning: Tom's white supremacist rant at the first dinner is so much worse on film when he is surrounded by black servants. That was a good choice and, I thought, boded well for the movie's attention to the novel's wider implications. Oh, and I was curious but not entirely surprised to see that they left out Nick's bisexuality. I realize this is a topic of some scholarly debate, but the scene between Nick and the photographer whose name escapes me is as explicit as Fitzgerald could make it and still be published in 1925 (the guy is in his underwear. In bed. Why, exactly, is Nick there unless they've just had sex?). Between that and the language he uses with regard to Gatsby, the case is pretty strong, IMO. I actually thought for a second they were going to go there when Tom says "Nick's artistic too," but then they dropped it; even the shaving cream bit comes off as a drug-addled moment rather than oddly intimate as it does in the book. It's interesting because Luhrmann does have some quasi-homoerotic subtext in some of his films (Romeo/Mercutio in R+J, and I always read Toulouse-Latrec as being in love with Christian in "Moulin Rouge"), but he backed off here and the line is just kind of...there, alluding to Nick's writing but not his sexuality.

Oh, they dropped the Jordan storyline entirely - that was weird. And in the interest of full disclosure, my dislike of Leo's performance was slightly influenced by the fact that I spent the whole book picturing blond Tom Hiddleston as Gatsby. Which is entirely Woody Allen's fault, but I couldn't help it. Still, I was prepared to overlook these things -- if not for Mr. Gatz and Daisy, I would have.

So there you are, Deep Thoughts on Gatsby. I guess it's good I gave myself a week to dwell on it? And obviously rereading the book immediately prior contributed, but I like to think I'd have still picked up on what made me uneasy, even if I couldn't articulate why. I don't hate the film and may even watch it again someday, but it's a big disappointment. It used so many of Fitzgerald's beautiful words, for fuck's sake! It could have been great. Instead it's just pretty, and wrong, and deeply frustrating.