Movie Review: The Great Gatsby

Finally the book we all had to read in high school is getting it's fourth movie adaptation as English teacher's wait with bated breath to see if this will be the version they show in their classroom for years to come or if they stick with the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  While it's a much more loyal portrayal of the source material than Baz Luhrmann's edgy Romeo + Juliet that took place in modern time, Luhrmann does get rid of some of the substance of the novel to add some style and bring this world to life for a modern audience while keeping the Roaring Twenties backdrop.



The Great Gatsby tells the story of one crazy summer of your average bond salesman, Nick Carraway's life.  After living next door to an eccentric millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who nobody seems to know anything about yet everyone goes to his parties every evening, Nick gets an invite to come over to Gatsby's house.  Carraway and Gatsby begin to develop a friendship revolving around Gatsby wanting to rekindle the romance started 5 years previously with Nick's cousin Daisy, who is currently married to an equally eccentric millionaire, Tom Buchanan. 

While Baz Luhrmann doesn't direct a lot of movies, when he does you know it's going to be beautifully shot and this movie is no exception.  In a lot of ways the camera was almost limitless on where it could go as it moved frequently and everywhere especially during Gatsby's party scenes.  While it was good to look at, what really stood out most about this movie was the cast.  Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jay Gatsby and as per usual delivers a stupendous performance and proves why he's one of the greatest workers in Hollywood today.  I also can't say enough good things about Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton as all of them brought Nick, Daisy, and Tom Buchanan to life and gave tremendous performances as well. 

Where the movie suffers most is length.  It times out at 2 hours and 20 minutes and while the beginning is a good set-up of everything that's about to occur, it just takes too long to get there.  While the movie was full of visual goodness, some of the long party scenes of people singing and dancing could have been cut down just to focus on the story more. Unfortunately Luhrmann's flaw is he always wants all of his scenes to look bigger and more spectacular, when sometimes he needs to tone things down a bit.   While I appreciate what Luhrmann was trying to do, having Jay-Z and other curent artists do the music for the movie by inserting some actual songs or 20's style performances of his songs, it just took you out of this world.  Luhrmann tried to channel Moulin Rouge's performance of current songs in older times again but it didn't feel genuine to The Great Gatsby at all.

While visually stunning and terrifically acted this version of The Great Gatsby suffers from being a little too much.  The Great Gatsby is a literary classic and this version of the film does as good of a job as possible to convey this to a 21st Century audience, it's still the same source material that most of us didn't want to read in school.  It's one of those movies that I'm definitely glad I saw and would recommend to others interested. I just can't envision myself re-watching when it comes out on Blu-Ray or even 5 years down the road.  However, if there was a version of The Great Gatsby I would have to watch, I would want it to be this one.

3 stars out of 5