The Great Gatsby (2013)

Well, how do you like that: I said before, "I doubt I'll take a chance on Australia or The Great Gatsby." What changed my mind? My dad's invitation to watch the DVD with him. By this time, I had forgotten Baz Luhrmann's involvement and started wondering whether I would find the story more engaging than I had in the F. Scott Fitzgerald book.

Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) narrates from a mental hospital how he knew his most captivating New York State neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps practicing for the same year's The Wolf of Wall Street). Gatsby is an obscenely rich man of mystery, throwing lavish parties attended by just about everybody for miles around. But he confides in Nick that it's all an effort to draw the attention of the woman he loves, who happens to be Nick's cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan). She married man's man Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) back when Gatsby felt too poor to marry. With Nick's help, Daisy does come back into Gatsby's life, but of course this means inviting trouble....

From what I remember after 20 years (more than you might think), this telling is highly faithful to the source material. It sure doesn't skimp on the literary symbolism, such as the faded sign showing the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. I had expected a fake British accent from Gatsby to complement his frequent use of "old sport," but he doesn't claim to have lived long in the UK.

What's not faithful is the music, most notably in the party scenes. I might give a pass to modern songs with a somewhat old-fashioned sound to them, but the raps really/i> don't evoke the Roaring Twenties. I could blame co-producer Jay-Z, but ultimately I think it falls on Luhrmann again.

It might be under Jay-Z's influence that we see a lot of Black people around. None of them have important parts or even spoken lines that I recall, but they pop up as far more than servants, which I doubt Fitzgerald had in mind. This despite preserving some openly racist dialog by the Buchanans.

Speaking of which, I kept my eye on Gatsby's unlawful correspondent, Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan), who's almost certainly an anti-Semitic caricature in the book. The present screen Meyer is more or less the same, but at least there's no narration at the moment to make his religious background explicit.

If anything reduces the political incorrectness, it's the omission of the "woman driver" stereotype. In the book, two women drive carelessly; in the movie, only one does, and only after at least one man has done it. Of course, Luhrmann might have been simply cutting a plot-unimportant scene to make room for more buildup of Gatsby's character.

I did find myself feeling sorrier for Gatsby herein than I had before. Maybe the lush visuals helped make his struggle realer for me. Or maybe the ever self-serious ex-Romeo DiCaprio did a better job than I'm inclined to give him credit for. My emotion certainly wasn't helped along by Maguire's tepidness.

Most Rotten Tomatoes critics didn't care much for this version of TGG, tho mainstream audiences were fairly generous. To me, it felt a bit bloated at 143 minutes but not unreasonable. The spectacle is quirky at best, but dry old Gatsby could use a dose of that. If I had loved the book, I might be disappointed; instead, I think Luhrmann did an adequate job.