"The Great Gatsby" (2013)

Going into The Great Gatsby, it's important you don't approach it as an adaptation. It doesn't matter whether it's a good adaptation (for the record: not so much). But when a novel so widely considered to be a literary classic is made into a movie, how it is as an adaptation immediately becomes one of the most pressing questions -- probably unnecessarily so.

Director Baz Lurhmann doesn't seem concerned with the story but rather using the structure of the narrative to play around with his particular stylistic sensibility. Lurhmann takes his lush, grand visual style from Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, and just lets it roam free. Thought Moulin Rouge was indulgent? Well, Gatsby makes it look tame by comparison. This is cinematic, directorial navel-gazing on overdrive.

Lurhmann turns the film into a sensory overload. There isn't a moment, a story beat, that can't be made more extravagant and grand-eloquently melodramatic. "What's the most over the top way this could be shot?" Lurhmann appears to ask himself at every turn. Where its literary source was subtle, the film is blunt and on-the-nose in really embarrassing ways. "Dr. T.J. Ecklberg is the eyes of God!" Nick essentially shouts at one point. Thanks Spark Notes!

The grandeur of Lurhmann's style leads to an abundance of excess. It's a film that's at least a thirty minutes too long, if not more. Give Lurhmann credit for one thing though; he somehow manages to keep every major moment from the book, at multiple points to the film's detriment. Gatsby is a good story but one that's highly uncinematic. If stripped bare for parts, and re-shuffled, it might be a doable story as a movie, but not in its literal form.

Granted, the look of the film is luscious and resplendent, but eventually it becomes repetitive. Lurhmann seems to have so little actual interest in telling the story that it becomes hard to become invested. The novel is emotionally sedated but Lurhmann, by contrast, treats the material as if there's a life-or-death spectacle. It's this disconnect that makes the film drag.

It's only in Gatsby's head that everything seems so romantically exaggerated, but the film isn't from his perspective. It's from Nick's, the quiet, unassuming confidant; the film adds a new story where Nick ends up in a psych ward recounting the story to cope with the loss of Gatsby, but it's just an excuse to create false drama. We're at an emotional disconnect from the events even though the film seems to believe we're feeling All Of The Emotions!

There are some good performances -- particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as Old Gatsby -- but they're stifled by Lurhmann's visual proclivities, which suffocate any underlying sense of intimacy. Sure, there's the initial giddily inebriated rush of that big party you wanted to go to, but soon the hangover starts setting in. 

 Grade: ★★