[quote]CircaThursday wrote:
The Great Gatsby is a very good movie. It successfully delivers the themes and overall message of the book. It has stunning visuals. that make the audience feel the overwhelming superficiality and ostentation that the book portrays long island to have in the 1920s.
The characters are hollow and and all image, which is a theme of the book. The acting is outstandingly good. The main themes and motifs of the book are served to the audience on platter as in your face and upfront as the lavishness of Gatsbys parties.
I see lots of entertainment value, acting talent, symbolism and great production in this movie. I highly recommend this movie.
Sure it may not include all of the character detail of the book, but the overall messages are obviously present in the movie.[/quote]
It stays very true to the novel, but do you not feel that, that in and of itself, leads to a flaw in that we’re not subjected to a visual representation of the characters, but more a basal introduction to them through the means of literature as opposed to cinema? I can appreciate that DiCaprio’s performance as Gatsby was well played, but in someone like Nick Carraway, where the information he presents is more textual than emotional as it would be in a novel, do you not feel that it left out much of the potential to see the character’s external radiance in response to the whole debacle he’s faced with and the intricacies of his past? I felt it was almost like the novel was being thrown in my face, so Luhrmann wouldn’t have to take the time and effort for the character to represent himself in a deeper, more subtle manner.
I applaud all of the actors for their roles, but Maguire seemed largely unfulfilled as Carraway simply by virtue of the script being too blunt and confined within it’s own boundaries for him to really express himself and catch up to the others.
The characters are hollow, and Luhrmann takes the visuals and the glamour of the movie to represent that, but I almost feel like his approach was less of an intent to show the ugliness behind the mask sometimes, than it was just “Here, look at how shiny everything looks” without really expressing the darker modicums hidden beneath that. It was so visually intensive, that it almost served to take away from the expression of the insecurities and self-indulgent motives of the characters, in favour of just giving the audience a good time.
I wish Luhrmann had not been so tied in to the source material, and that is not something I would have ever expected myself to say, but given the circumstances he doesn’t allow everything to represent itself in theatre as opposed to in literature, I feel that he tries to match Fitzgerald so much that he comes up short in comparison, and then fills the movie with the generic Hollywood tropes in an effort to disguise that.
I may be holding bias here because I have a long history of disliking Baz Luhrmann’s work, but I can’t bring myself to really enjoy this, or feel it is anywhere near as endearing or eloquently presented as the novel.