Surplus Shopping at Gatsby's

Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the Fitzgerald classic follows the novel verbatim -- the script is practically copied and pasted from the book, which is a smart move considering the number of people who love quoting Daisy Buchanan's "Well, I'm certainly glad to see you here," and Gatsby's "You all right, old sport?" However, he packages the film in a different manner, and in the first few minutes we see the narrator Nick Carraway talking to a psychiatrist, articulating the first two pages of The Great Gatsby.

Now, if I were in an art gallery and The Great Gatsby was a painting, Baz Luhrmann would be the patron of that day's show and he would be talking about The Great Gatsby, but I, new to the paintings, would be unconvinced. He would only come off as a dilettante. That is the film, in a nutshell.

The film had its glorious moments, times when I marveled at the accurate replay of the twenties' surfeit of glamour and wondered if the producers actually came up with a budget in the first place. Each scene is an explosion of noise and color; nothing went overlooked in the production. The lines were delivered with perfect enunciation. Basically, everything is and has everything.

And that is the problem.


The film is overproduced. Replete with effects and someone's vocals (almost all the scenes have a part of the OST in loop), Luhrmann's adaptation is a flashy, boisterous display of Gatsby's equally tumultuous deterioration. I understand that the point of the CGI act is to emphasize the twenties lifestyle but the excessive visual interpretations of the script are so random they are almost kitschy. (Imagine Gatsby staring at the sky and Daisy's face appears in it, like in Lion King, only this is not an animated feature.) The cast is its ultimate saving grace, with compelling performances delivered by Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire.

"He is in love with me!" Possibly the world's most selfish woman,
Daisy Buchanan  (Carey Mulligan) single-handedly destroys Gatsby's life.

The adaptation is a superficial take on the American Dream; it merely translates words into pictures, leaving the whole gist of the story forgotten. Luhrmann scratches violently at the edges of Fitzgerald's genius in hopes of achieving it. While the film is rightfully ambitious, as it should be, because The Great Gatsby is about the rise and fall of the American empire in the twenties, it falls short because of the single thing it does have but never puts to good use: overabundance.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the pieces of literature I love the most and it was almost serendipitous when I, upon finishing the book, found out there would be a film adaptation. I have already decided long ago that I will not practice the habit of comparing the film to the book because my disappointment mostly stems from observing that the film does not match my interpretation of the story, and that reason alone is not valid. I am not comparing the book and the film.