The Great Gatsby: get the soundtrack, read the book, skip the movie

“Less is more.” A far-flying concept many artists never quite grasp – some justifiably so (Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton), others who ought to be ashamed of themselves (Michael Bay, M. Night Shyamalan) and a few with mixed results. Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!) falls into the latter category. You’d think he’d have learned to reign in the needless pizazz and keep the visual flourishes in check over the years. Sadly, overblown still appears to be the Aussie filmmaker’s modus operandi.

Twenty minutes into The Great Gatsby, and you begin to understand why the film’s release date kept getting postponed over the past year. Luhrmann’s ultra-modern take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential 20th century novel falls short with its all-spectacle, no-soul critique of jazz-fuelled decadence and unruly excess in “Roaring Twenties” America.

The splashy film recounts the tale of mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leo DiCaprio), who throws lavish parties at his Long Island mansion in the hopes of catching the attention of Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), a great love he let slip away, and who’s now caught in an unhappy marriage with a philandering husband (Joel Edgerton). Tasked with bringing the long lost couple back together is Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire, doing his expected wide-eyed-wonder shtick), a bond salesman who lives next door to Gatsby.

Music video montages hijack the film
The ambitious production attempts to convey the moral decay and decadence of the nouveau riche, but its excess-pumped execution comes across as gimmicky and emotionally vacant. Luhrmann attempts to wow us with 3D razzle dazzle and ENDLESS anachronistic music video montages of contemporary rap, rock and soul set to sequences of 1920s America. This jarring generational juxtaposition could well have worked (as it did in his inspired retooling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), but in this case, the film becomes little more than a series of hollow music video vignettes that not only clash with the story, but do nothing to drive it forward.

The film is irredeemably long (by a good hour, I’d say) and Luhrmann's approach to the literary material often feels amateurish (warning: the floating lines of text culled from the book may induce cinematic nausea). For the most part, the uniformly strong performances are the film’s sole redeeming quality. Leo DiCaprio makes for a solid, conflicted Gatsby, an "old sport" wrestling with his own moral ambivalence and a shady bootlegging business.

Far from being a god-awful film, Luhrmann nevertheless tampers with one of the Great American Novels – and doesn’t even come close to doing it justice. In many ways, that amounts to a trainwreck. Our advice? Skip the film, but check out the stellar Jay Z-orchestrated soundtrack (as reviewed by Éric Samson here), with Lana Del Rey’s melancholy magic and solid contributions from The xx, Emeli Sandé, Florence and the Machine and Jack White.

The Great Gatsby
Now in theatres