The Great Gatsby ***

F.Scott Fitzgerald’s evocative and tragic novel, The Great Gatsby(1925), dealt with the titular character's endeavour to recapture a lost moment of love within the backdrop of the decadent roaring twenties. Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge!  and Australia, now helms this radically modernised and ostentatious adaptation. The plot involves Nick Carraway,(Tobey Maguire) the story’s narrator, who moves to Long Island to learn about business bonds. However he becomes interested in his elusive neighbour, Jay Gatsby,(Leonardo DiCaprio) who holds extravagant parties from across his lawn. As our narrator begins to untangle the nuances of Jay Gatsby’s cryptic past, Nick also learns about Gatsby's troubling lost love, Daisy Buchanan(Carey Mulligan).

Luhrmann’s previous films have had a sparkling and decidedly glib quality to the production and this new adaptation is decorated with similarly bright, sparkling surfaces - but Gatsby is not an entirely shallow film. The enchanting quality of the novel always resided within Fitzgerald’s striking aptitude for constructing incredibly evocative illusions and imagery. Whereas one can go looking at symbolism speciously within literature, Fitzgerald gave his figurative ideas a looming and prophetic purpose; such as the judgemental eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg and the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, that Gatsby reaches out for so desirably. This delicate imagery that is so carefully woven into the novel is boldly and brashly thrust into Lurhmann’s film with very little subtlety, however, these symbols are conjured with a certain level of magical impact. Film is a literal medium and making metaphors bold and real and symbols lucid and physical has both substance and validity within Lurhmann’s filmic vision as well Gatsby’s own struggle in trying to make his dreams and idealised imaginings transform from the intangible to the tangible.

The modern sense of excess and hedonism is what Luhrmann has evidently found within the novel - the symbolic elements are audacious and explicit, the drama is overplayed and the performances are loud, exaggerated and full of melodrama. There is a newly integrated narrative device whereby Nick Carraway, jaded by alcoholism, recounts the events of the Gatsby affair to his therapist. This therefore constructs the story as a flashback or dream sequence making the events of The Great Gatsby seem just like the dizzying, hyperbolic and over-the-top drunken fragments of someone trying to piece together the follies of the night before – except Carraway has woken from this dream into the sobriety of reality as the opulent surroundings head for an inevitable crash. Gatsby’s parties are therefore both a visual headache and really spectacular - to quote the source, these lavish revelries really do have ‘enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s garden’ – and then some. The film has noisy, hyper real adrenaline fuelled car chase set-pieces with totally disorientating sweeping zoom shots to the backdrop of a thumping soundtrack(provided by the likes of Jay-Z and Will.i.am). However, all of this outrageousness seems to hang together within the films garish, staggering drunkenness and when we are finally introduced to Gatsby, it literally looks as though the frame is about to explode.

Luhrmann has made an overdriven version of The Great Gatsby that still retains a latent metaphorical and magical augury underneath the film’s excessive and superficial exterior.