This is an iconic performance - maybe his career best. In his final moment of realization, DiCaprio's blue eyes match the blue of Gatsby's pool, and his anguished face, framed in tight close-up, has a ghastly beauty. (He could play Superman.) When Gatsby's deceptions are revealed and his illusions shattered, DiCaprio becomes at once terrifying and pathetic, a false idol toppling himself from his pedestal.
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We see the calculations behind his eyes, but we also believe that he could hide them from the other characters - most of them, anyway.ĭiCaprio's acting evokes Nick's description of the human personality as "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Luhrmann cuts some scenes to make it seem as if the character really is omniscient - as if he can see and hear for miles and read people's thoughts and feelings - and DiCaprio plays these moments with a mix of inscrutability and delight, as if Gatsby knows something we don't, but is too clever to say precisely what. The actor's choices drive home the idea that Gatsby is playing the man he wishes he were, and that others need him to be. And yet DiCaprio makes him comprehensible and achingly real. On the page, the character is so mysterious, so much a projection of the book's narrator, that you'd think he'd be as unplayable onscreen as Kurtz or John Galt he eluded Alan Ladd and Robert Redford, the role's previous inhabitants. Once you've spent time with his cast, you understand why he was torn.ĭiCaprio's Gatsby is the movie's greatest and simplest special effect: an illusion conjured mainly through body language and voice.
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The movie wants to be a "kaleidoscopic carnival," to quote a phrase from the book's description of a Jay Gatsby party, but Luhrmann's instincts seem more traditional, even square, and the two impulses cancel each out. Once you get past the movie's opening eruptions of visual excess - hundreds of party guests boozing and hollering and doing the Charleston CGI cityscapes that visualize 1920s New York by way of Warren Beatty's candy-colored " Dick Tracy" a long expository talk between Gatsby and Nick in a careening computer-buffed roadster that moves as believably as the talking cab in " Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - "The Great Gatsby" settles into a traditional groove: scene, scene, montage, scene, burst of violence, moment of reflection. Luhrmann didn't set out to make a PBS-style, bare-bones adaptation, but there are times when it feels as though he secretly wants to. Once that happens, the Luhrmannerisms distract from the film's true heart: the actions and feelings of its characters. So do the anachronistic soundtrack mash-ups (modern hip-hop layered over ragtime piano and the like).īut in the film's dark second half, "The Great Gatsby" half-forgets its mandate to wow us and zeroes in on actors in rooms. The CGI-assisted camera acrobatics feel obligatory. From frame one, they're Dionysian whirls of booze, lust and hero worship, minus the sense that that things are ebbing and flowing as they would at a real party. This framing device is inferred from statements Fitzgerald made in "The Crack-Up," and "Gatsby" often refers to itself as a book, so even though it isn't officially part of the source, it's hardly a blasphemous indulgence still, it's one more buffer between viewer and story in a movie that already has more than its share.Īll this busywork might astonish if Lurhmann's heart were in it-but is it? The guests at Gatsby's party are too obviously directed, and there's no sense of escalation in the gatherings. We see the book's Prohibition-era settings (East Egg and West Egg, New York City, and the sooty wasteland in between) through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway ( Tobey Maguire), who's writing a memoir-confession from an asylum. If you've seen Lurhmann's " Strictly Ballroom," " Romeo + Juliet" or " Moulin Rouge," or watched "Gatsby" trailers, you know what you're in for: an epic melodrama that fuses old-movie theatrics and subjective filmmaking, period music and modern pop, real sets and unreal landscapes, psychological drama and speeded-up slapstick.
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