The Great Gatsby

I’ve never quite got Baz Luhrmann and this awful adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel hardly helps matters. If there’s a worse directed opening of a film this year I’ll eat a pair of 3D glasses. In fact for the opening 20 minutes read the entire film. Where to begin? The overload of special effects making the film resemble an imaginary world? (if you claim Luhrmann did that on purpose pass me another pair of those 3D specs). Tobey Maguire’s goofy performance? Carey Mulligan’s blandness? (seriously, how does she keep winning all these parts?). Actually let’s stop listing things and get to the root of the problem, mainly that Luhrmann appears to have not understood Fitzgerald’s source material in the slightest. How else to explain his decision to modernise everything from the fashions to the dire soundtrack. Forget the Roaring Twenties setting when there’s merchandising coin to be made, huh? The only plus points are Leonardo DiCaprio as the mysterious Gatsby (though his catchphrase of “Old Sport” will leave you gritting your teeth by the time you hear it for the fiftieth time) and Joel Edgerton gives good edginess and is virtually the only decent example of a character who has some development in the film. Basically Luhrmann couldn’t have been a worse choice to develop a novel that is short in length and delicate in its prose. Lehmann delivers 2 hours 20 minutes of bright images and not much else. Finally, perhaps someone should have pointed out that for one of the quintessential novels about New York and its suburbs, it was probably a good idea not to shoot it in bloody Sydney. Rating: 3/10.