On Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby"

If you haven't been scared away by the loud, gaudy, Fergie-laden TV spots already, be warned. Give Baz Luhrmann's latest a wide berth if you're looking for a quietly respectful, conventionally tasteful, prestige-picture adaptation of The Great Gatsby. You'll have much better luck (and a much duller time) with the tepidly elegant version from the seventies.

This Gatsby is a wonder. It is often marvelously good entertainment, and even more frequently a grandly mournful thing. It lurches drunkenly sometimes between the frantic fun of it all and the big, blue sadness at the heart of the story it wants to tell. One worries if the whole ambitious enterprise, with its gleefully unashamed visual fakery and its brassy, anachronistic soundtrack, is going to come crashing down around the burnished ears of its beautiful lead players. But it never slips completely, and stays engrossing for the entirety of its generous run- time.

The makers don't toy much with the structure or content of the novel (except for adding an unfortunate and unnecessary framing device, in which Nick Carraway is shown writing the novel at a sanatorium. Even as he voices Fitzgerald's words, they leap, redundantly and stupidly, off his typewritten pages and onto the screen.) Carraway recounts the story of how he met Jay Gatsby, owner of a mysterious fortune and many beautiful shirts. Gatsby has bought an enormous Long Island estate, where he throws vast parties and generates wild rumors about himself, right across the bay from the Buchanans, a young married couple of pedigreed fortune. As it turns out, Mrs. Buchanan, Carraway's cousin, is Gatsby's old flame, and he wants her back. The setting is at once a wonderland and a waste. Most of the characters are either monstrously privileged or of shady provenance. Almost everyone behaves badly.

Luhrmann doesn't need to tinker with the story to make this cinematic iteration of the book entirely his own. The film takes time to get there, but Luhrmann's vision clicks loudly into place in the lurid party scene at Myrtle's apartment, filmed in the color-drenched, acid-trip style so beloved of the director. The camera weaves madly in and out of the chaos to bring us into the experience of a very drunk Nick who, at one point, spies himself outside in the street, looking up at him. He is the observer even as he has finally been forced to participate. The relationship between the observer and the observed was at the heart of Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where the writer falls headlong in love with the performer onstage - a courtesan who seems, despite her profession, impossibly perfect to him. That dynamic is foregrounded in Gatsby, too, making his version curiously singular. The primary love story here is the one between Carraway and Gatsby. Carraway watches Gatsby, awestruck, as the latter narrates how he conjured himself out of nothing, as he moves confidently through various glittering, mindless hordes, as he falls valiantly to pieces. Nick, like Moulin Rouge's Christian, is a writer, albeit one who has set aside his artistic ambitions. He, too, falls in love with a performer. James Gatz heroically acts the monumental role of Jay Gatsby, and Nick can't tear his eyes away, though he knows that his idol, the crook in whom he perceives an uncorrupted soul, is doomed. I wonder if Luhrmann is perhaps projecting a personal love of movie stars - those glamorous shadows, both mercenary and idealized, with whom our love affair is magical and tragically brief - onto the stories he chooses to film. At any rate, Luhrmann realizes the equation between Carraway and his hero (played with warm chemistry by DiCaprio and Maguire, who brings to Nick an effective mixture of lost-boy creepiness and wide-eyed empathy) with the kind of nuance that many, for whom Carraway is rather flat even on the page, would not have thought possible. The successful fleshing out of Carraway renders the framing-device nonsense even more egregious, and adds unforgivable minutes to a film that, in spite of all its candied frenzy, moves at a stately pace, and could have benefitted from a good fifteen minutes of trimming.

The film may overstay its welcome, but I found not much else else to dislike about it. The digital wizardry that I was so skeptical about allows the film an air of macabre enchantment, but also gives it a plasticky vulgarity when required. The party scenes, with their whirling, Prada- clad extras and their wall-to-wall musical flourishes, are seductive and sickening. You want to be in that drunk, thrashing crowd, but you also know you might feel lonely and tired and sad at the end of all the revelry.

All of it would come to naught, of course, if Gatsby himself were boring or unconvincing. But Dicaprio is winningly unbowed by the pressure of playing American literature's most iconic man. I've been growing a little tired of the actor's grimacing and brooding, all of it done expertly, of course, in film after film. But here, he is excellent. He brings a beating heart to Gatsby; the shadows of the character are fuller in his performance, the lights more lively. (And those eyes haven't been bluer since Romeo+Juliet.) His best moment is when he comes in from the rain, terrified and eager and in pain, to see Daisy after five years. The tremulousness is unexpectedly out in the open and just right.

When I'd fantasy-cast Gatsby, Carey Mulligan was my pick for Daisy. The British actress certainly has the sweet, expensive prettiness for the part. But Mulligan is surprisingly reticent early on, keeping the charm turned down when you'd expect it to be at full, fluttery blast. But when Daisy meets Gatsby in Carraway's cottage, Mulligan comes thrillingly alive. She uses her sweet, sorrowful face to full effect in DiCaprio's arms, or when her lover and her husband (Joel Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan with a boar-like ugliness and heft) tussle over her. Amitabh Bachchan (the Indian acting legend whom Luhrmann cast in the part of a Jewish gangster because . . . he could?) is reliably witty, and Elizabeth Debicki, arch and dismissively sexy as Jordan Baker, is a find.

Gatsby is going to be a widely hated film. Several critics have damned it for its excesses, for its shallowness, for its lack of reverence for its source material. It is certainly excessive, refusing to maintain a chilled, ironic distance from the unhinged, amoral celebrations it depicts. This is a film that wants to have a grand time, never mind reverence. But it is also a work of sustained sadness, aware of the tragedy that awaits not just at the story's end, but around every corner. I walked out of the theater, feeling an inevitable and not unpleasant sort of melancholy, much like I had when I first read The Great Gatsby at fourteen. I am not suggesting, of course, that this imperfect film is an artistic equal to that gemlike book. But it is certainly a memorable thing in its own, vigorously odd fashion.