The New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott once said, “Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will.”
You want hubris? Who better than Baz Luhrman to retell The Great Gatsby? Since Romeo + Juliet, I’ve been waiting for Baz to hit another homerun. And he absolutely does with The Great Gatsby for the same reason that Romeo +Juliet was so successful. He has a fabulous story as his launch.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age has many parallels to our current time: unmitigated greed, income inequity, the sense of entitlement the wealthy assume, the hysteria of excess. These are the mileposts of the American Dream, and everyone feels that the dream is within reach. But at the heart of The Great Gatsby is the tragic love affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is almost in reach, just as the green light at the end of her dock beckons to Gatsby from across the bay. And I feel Gatsby’s heartbreak more deeply than I ever did reading the novel, marvelous as it is.
The movie was brilliantly acted with Leo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. The score by Jay-Z adds to the excitement, and then there’s Luhrman’s fabulous spectacle. Just be prepared to have your heart broken.
One more thing: The Wall Street Journal HATES this picture. Now, don’t you want to go see it?