Movie Review for "The Great Gatsby" (2013)

The Great Gatsby 

Free manifesto in defense of (Luhrmann’s) cinema - or something like "the Fitzgerald disappointment remains"

In 2013, director Baz Luhrmann’s choices already seem destined to not please anyone. He is the filmmaker of the wrong way, of the opposite side. Comparisons with Ed Wood, the worst filmmaker ever, were made due to attack his newest feature. In a certain way, the attacks should be welcomed: at least he is not malicious; there is authorship, some integrity, and an undoubted loyalty to the director believes on his personal point of view. Anyway, opportunism is not the tonic. Unfortunately, all ingredients for commercial failure. The Great Gatsby (2013), in Luhrmann's version, is also a film language exercise, an ode to the history of cinema, as he did in Moulin Rouge! (2001), in Romeo + Juliet (1996), and in Australia (2008) - there is always a great syncretism, where he merges musical theater, the burlesque, kitsch elements, high culture, pop songs, and, as usual throughout all his filmography, fits into the vein of the so called “postmodernism”. Is there a reflection of our time? It may have – but it’s too late for now. But nevertheless, with The Great Gatsby, he does not diminish, he does not simplify the lyricism of the book, which is a dense portrait of society and human feelings.

We live in the age of simplification. And so as expected, it will not please the huge audience, because it fails not to create a simple pastiche, or an ordinary parody, or satire, and not even mentioning promiscuity, levity, and, above all, frivolity, this element so worshiped and praised in these times. At one point, with much distinction, Luhrmann mentions Rear Window (1954) during a scene in The Great Gatsby. Who knew? Who cares? Does it matter? Not enough disposable, it does not reach the level of the fad, of the empty entertainment. The Great Gatsby is the adaptation of a literary classic to the Hollywood industry - but not just another classic, but the novel that is one the most important works of the American literature. There is no way to adapt such a book to film without being stoned, whatever the result is. Working on immaculate texts by history, from Shakespeare to Fitzgerald, Luhrmann knows the risks he takes but seems not afraid or intimidated, he is aware of the tough consequences. Our admirable new version of Ed Wood seems loyal to his delusions, in his particular way to make movies.

These are not only contemporary versions of old movies and books – these are also versions attending to his very particular taste, to his heart wishes. Therefore, he inevitably will found critical failure as he prints his personal style to the established canon, mixing high culture, as represented by the score of classical composer George Gershwin, with fashionable pop music by Lana Del Rey, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. He takes a classic of 1925, and on it does a frantic editing, including free digital camera movement in the diegetic space, shots that do not last more than 3 seconds, conspicuous use of computer graphics and color treatment in post-production. And of course, lots of music punctuating every scene. Towards, conservatives see him as someone who does not have enough intellectual background to take a classic plot seriously, or at least to bring to the public something minimally faithful to the manuscript and the original context. He has no choice: on one side, he is going against stupidity and coarseness that is expected of everything that is done to please a large audience. On the other side, fights against nostalgia, the conservatism, which does not allow noise and impurities. Everything is a matter of perspective.

The Great Gatsby has been hyped through the internet with the most horrifying adjectives which a movie may be called. It is a curious phenomenon. A little clarity does not hurt anyone, and it seems quite obvious that it cannot be that bad. What should be thought are the reasons why the receptivity of a good movie like this was so hostile. It is inevitable to wonder, think out loud, in parallel, that people live in a time where it is celebrated with praise that any teenager who had never went near to any work of literature can make movies using photographic cameras and post it on YouTube, and then quickly gets the status of a genius, as the great art of our time. There are studies that affirms that every new medium, new format that comes out, the language principles comes near to zero – from Wii videogames, and so for videos for the internet. In this sense Internet and its digital low budget cinema on YouTube serve as a huge cloak, an impregnable force that pulls everything and everyone into the amateurism – if not to mediocrity and stupidity. But it undeniably affects the popular taste.

There is an interesting book on this subject, called The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen. The same force that generates serious treatment for any simple video posted on social networks is the same enhance the greatest atrocities oriented to works that are not necessarily crap, as this film directed by Baz Luhrmann, and therefore, to an adaptation of the main work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this context, Luhrmann’s specific film language, the subjects covered by Fitzgerald, the celluloid projected in the darkened room, the intending to take Gatsby to the movie theaters again, all of this strangely seems too distant, dated and irrelevant to us, away from our ongoing reality. There is a backfire: wanting to make a current version of Gatsby, post-television, post-music video, post-cinema, the same current context rejects it, and the reasons are diverse, as some as mentioned above. The damage is already done. The human dilemma of the lonely, passionate and millionaire of Jay Gatsby seems that simply ceased to exist, that will not find any identification with almost anyone from the huge audience. As words that no longer exist. Sounds pretty admirable that someone want to adapt Fitzgerald as a Hollywood movie nowadays. New versions of old classics always existed during all cinema history, even today, as people can see in Les Miserables (2012), by Tom Hooper. Not always highly valued, not always with good results - says the infamous quotation: "great literature does not convert into great movies." But in a period that the movie industry experiences its worst moment ever, surviving almost exclusively on superhero franchises and movies with high level of mental sickness, such as The Hangover, Fast and the Furious, Twilight Saga, Brazilian comedies played by soap opera actors… the list goes on. Bring to the big screen the dilemmas of the human condition of The Great Gatsby, exhibit it on movie theaters, to the big crowd, is something that worth a standing ovation. To say that Luhrmann ruins the book, takes a serious plot and then make something simply histrionic and eloquent, destroying the supposed "moral" of a writer that stood against capitalism and bourgeoisie values... what a nonsense. Whoever says this, or never read any Fitzgerald book, or never understood it. Or even worse, it demonstrates ignorance about the author's life. F. Scott Fitzgerald was never Manichean, and he has always had quite dubious feelings about the lavish lifestyle of the cosmopolitan American Jazz Age. In his very own way, he was a scholar who understood a concept of beauty, in part inherited from Europe, but which was born as soon as the United States became the major economic power in the world, that establishes the signs and symbols that determine power relationships among social classes - a phenomenon that always occurred when an empire arises, as happened in Greece, Rome, etc. There is an aesthetic force emanating from parties, music, drinks, elegance, fashionable clothes, lines of the cars, the speed, the small pleasures of worldly actions, the beauty and the vigor of youth. Fitzgerald was much more into to the depth of thought of writer such as Oscar Wilde ("The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible") than a mere shallow opposition to society, to the "American way of life", as some people mistakenly like to affirm. His disappointment was with life itself, it is with the human nature. Fitzgerald, from classics such as This Side of Paradise and Tender is the Night, is more than a social critic, but above all someone who create portraits, which exhibit characters through existential conflicts, along with the author's own concerns: talented but disillusioned, whose life was marked by early success, a troubled marriage and, perhaps most tragically, by the rapid decline caused by a terrible and fatal alcohol dependence. His message is not based on "social benefit".

It is true that Fitzgerald was quite concise, rewrote his books to the minimum pages, to the essential, but criticize the film for excesses does not seem logical to a time when the glorified cinema are the long television series. Interesting to see intellectuals stating that the old cinema became the tale, and the TV series, the novel. These are, interestingly, the same detractors of films like The Great Gatsby. When George Lucas and Steven Spielberg talk about "cinema implosion" at USC, the University of Southern California, we discover that the full-length high budget format, with artistic ambitions for screening in movie theaters may be threatened for the reasons already mentioned here, and Gatsby is certainly an example that justifies this kind of apocalyptic view. Mario Vargas Llosa, the nobel prize winner, in his recent book “The Civilization of Spectacle”, said he feared that with the migration of books for tablets, literature could fall into an irreversible decline, on which literature becomes pure banality. In fact this phenomenon is already happening - with both film and literature. And the Internet, of course, this immense amalgam that does not differentiate between a classic of literature of a celebrity tweet, the great cinema and an instagram photo, is often considered as the great revolutionary bound of this time of progress. The current rule is: by decreasing the level of information and repertoire of a message, more people can join. Lurhman’s Gatsby wanted to bring Fitzgerald to the new times, to a contemporary version, relevant to the ongoing context. It's a good movie. But taking in count the cultural context of film, and the suicidal nature of its noble mission, the ratings are far from desirable. Or even: what could say Fitzgerald seeing the critic failure of this film, if resurrected? He probably would say: "… but that is what I’ve said in the book, that greed, superficiality, opportunism and bad behavior of men would triumph over the true feelings and good intentions."