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The film looks and feels - Luhrmann is, after all, quite good at creating mood - like it is about to tell us something grand and profound, about a world that is both beginning and ending. Up to this point, luhrmann had won me over with tantalizing images: the famed green light pulsing lonely and alluring in the night, bright and saucy parties teetering on the brink of chaos (and only feeling slightly like rehashes of various Moulin Rouge scenes), Gatsby himself framed by fireworks, a curious sad smile on his face.
MENACING SYMBOLS IN THE GREAT GATSBY MOVIE
RELATED: Is the 'Great Gatsby' Movie Just Going to Be High-School English All Over Again? He's a mysterious fellow, this Gatsby, and Nick takes to him immediately, hoping to learn the truth about the man behind the mansion. Nick's wander into the extremes of extravagance continues as he meets his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mind-bogglingly wealthy man who throws lavish bacchanals at his West Egg mansion that are the talk of the town, though Gatsby himself doesn't ever seem to be having much fun. Daisy seems addled while Tom seems uninterested, but Nick is too busy gaping at their palace by the sea to notice - and too entranced by the down-low dirty booze-'n'-jazz life that Tom introduces him to in the city. She's married to an old Yale classmate of Nick's named Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), who despite his good breeding is mostly a swaggering, vaguely menacing lout. Nick arrives there as an ambitious young man, renting a house in West Egg but traveling to visit his cousin Daisy (a breezy yet ham-handed Carey Mulligan) across the bay.
MENACING SYMBOLS IN THE GREAT GATSBY FULL
West is full of the nouveau riche, while across the bay the old, old money set up camp long ago. Nick is quickly sucked into his memories of 1920s New York City and points east, specifically the North Shore of Long Island, home to the (invented) moneyed enclaves of West Egg and East Egg. RELATED: 'The Great Gatsby' Will Try to Totally Redeem Itself at Cannesīut back to those frenzied beginnings. I suppose Luhrmann wanted to give Gatsby the same sad sweep of Moulin Rouge, which also begins with a character telling a story about entering a near-fantastical world and grandly losing love. A little melancholy makes sense, time lost and all that, but these are not happy days being remembered. That Luhrmann and his co-adapter Craig Pearce decided to tack this framing device onto Fitzgerald's story has already been grumbled about a fair bit, so I won't do much of that here, but the bleak look of the place, and the deadness in Nick's eyes as he relates this fabulous tale of secrets and sandcastles, only serves to heighten the awkward sense that we are supposed to long for the old West Egg days when really I don't think that's the point of the story at all. Well, OK, the technical beginning of Gatsby places us on the quiet, wintry grounds of a sanitarium where our narrator Nick Carraway (forever bland Tobey Maguire) has holed himself up, seeking treatment for alcoholism, anxiety, and the sort of despair that typically afflicts young literary men. His beginnings are hurried and frantic, the camera darting to and fro as we meet a jumble of people, and the setting is always messily outlined. RELATED: The New 'Great Gatsby' Trailer Looks a Little Too Strangely FamiliarĮntering into a Baz Luhrmann film is always disorienting. Too enamored of its own decadence, The Great Gatsby says a lot without saying much of anything. The excesses of Roaring Twenties New York high society are certainly pooh-poohed in the film, but they are swaddled in so much visual pop and frenetic beauty that the criticism barely registers.
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Where Fitzgerald gives us a lyrical (but no less forceful for it) condemnation of a society ravaged by materialism, Luhrmann has created an opulent, tragic Horatio Alger tale of lost love. That said, I'm pretty sure Luhrmann's Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby are two very different things.
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Scott Fitzgerald's seminal novel, and I think the paper I wrote on it went well, but if you're looking for in-depth analysis of how Baz Luhrmann's gaudy new film adaptation compares to the intricacies of the novel, you may need to look elsewhere. I remember liking all the rich and mysterious writing in F. As a caveat, I should state up front that I have not read The Great Gatsby since high school, a decade and a half ago.