July 12: The Great Gatsby (2013 -- Baz Luhrmann)

★★★★
Count this movie among those of the summer that don’t disappoint.  It’s another big, splashy, digital sfx-travaganza, but unlike the last couple of Baz Luhrmann outings, Gatsby works.

Few directors can outdo Luhrmann when it comes to over-the-top surface excess, and he sets his sights on the perfect target when he swoops, cuts, choreographs and digitizes his way through his fantasy of the Roaring 20s.  Emphatically anachronistic music pulses, people jitter, fireworks explode and the viewer is absorbed into the glorious artifice of a film setting with no limit in reality.  These parts of the film that celebrate cinema’s inauthenticity are among the most mesmerizing, and they’re a true delight in 3D.

Other parts of Great Gatsby are calmer but just as artificial and just as interesting.  There’s the over-the-top lyrical beauty of Gatsby’s mansion as he shows it to Daisy and the flower-stuffed cottage that Nick loans Gatsby to facilitate meeting Daisy.  Then there’s the bleak foreboding of the wasteland between Long Island and New York City whose visuals suggest a period etching.  In every setting of the film, Luhrmann wrings out realism in favor of cinematic construct that is both self-referential but also answers to the needs of the story and characters.

Such artifice in Luhrmann has been there since his earliest work, but it doesn't always carry his films to the Gatsby.  The 2008 Australia uses the same mannerist cinema style, but the film’s artificiality keeps the viewer out rather than bringing us into what is happening onscreen as we experience in Gatsby.  A major factor in the different responses to the two films is the way Luhrmann uses his actors.  In Australia, Luhrmann has Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman act as artificial as the sets and pixels they are surrounded by, with the result that the audience has nothing to relate to in the film and remains disengaged.  Gatsby is an altogether different experience because Luhrmann has Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton bring nuance and depth to their characters.  DiCaprio’s Gatsby is deeply, obsessively in love; Mulligan’s Daisy is indecisive and conflicted; and Edgerton’s Tom is presumptuous, arrogant and threatened.  We see these qualities in the actors’ faces and gestures, and it’s the combination of these plausible characters and dramatic situations with Luhrmann’s impossibly baroque settings that gives Gatsby it’s uniquely cinematic aspect.  This intersection of the real and the irreal is the pleasure point of this film.
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Some viewers will be put off by the over-the-top digital work, the music-video camera and the theatrical staging of The Great Gatsby.  But this film is a rare treat for those who can embrace the artifice of cinema and still respond to a human heart beating at its center.