The Not So Great Baz-tsby

Oh, Baz Luhrmann. Why do you do it? Why do insist on making all of your films over-the-top acid trips that overwhelm the senses? People were laughing in the theater at moments that weren’t meant to be funny! I got a headache, and I didn’t even see the 3D version of the movie! And why didn’t anyone tell you that making a 3D version of Gastby, with a soundtrack full of Jay Z no less, is the most ridiculous idea ever???

So yes, I finally bit the bullet last night and saw The Great Gatsby with my husband in the theater. We don’t often make it to the theater anymore. Why bother when you can watch things on Apple TV or Netflix a few months down the road for less money and less hassle? But Gatsby is the one book we agree on as the Great American Novel. We named our son Fitzgerald for chrissakes. So we forked over $22 for this one. Unfortunately.

My expectations were pretty low. Previous efforts to put Gatsby on film have failed miserably. The 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow is very pretty, but SO BORING. Redford was trying so hard to be a man of mystery that he comes off as having no personality, which is the opposite of Gatsby’s character. Farrow just comes off as ditsy. But Daisy is a tough role to play. She’s just a unlikeable woman. I’ll get to that later. But anyway, when I heard that Baz was making this movie, I was terrified. OMG, he’s going to turn my favorite book into a musical with a laser light show. NOOOOO. And the result isn’t that far off.

Okay, I don’t hate all of his movies. I adored his Romeo+Juliet when I was in high school. Leo and Claire were perfectly cast, and in that case the modern setting and music totally worked. Moulin Rouge was great fun, but again, how much of that was the charm of Ewan MacGregor and the pretty costumes? Gatsby definitely has pretty costumes. If Baz’s wife, Catherine Martin, doesn’t win the Oscar for best costumes it’ll be a sin. The fashion mags and blogs have been going nuts with flapper madness for at least six months or longer. Vogue did a gorgeous spread with Carey Mulligan last month.

Good thing she looked pretty as Daisy, because that’s the best thing I can say about her performance. So I felt some hope when I saw how beautiful the movie LOOKED. And Leo! Leo is the perfect choice for Gatsby. He’s got the looks, the charisma, the depth, and the Old Hollywood air about him. He looks great in the Brooks Brothers suits. I thought his performance would be brilliant. Not so much. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. But I blame the terrible script and Mulligan, who is just not his equal acting-wise. I will defend Leo to the end, although my husband said he only did this movie because he must have bought a new yacht or mansion that he had to pay for.

So here’s the moment I almost walked out of the theater: At the beginning of the movie, to solve the problem of just doing boring voice-overs as previous versions of the book have done, Baz decides to put Nick Carraway in an asylum and make him an alcoholic. He’s talking to his therapist about Gatsby, and then the therapist recommends that he write about Gatsby as part of his recovery. Oh. My. God. This is so cheesy, and so wrong on so many levels. In the book, Nick is the voice of reason, the moral compass, the normal Midwestern guy. He observes these crazy rich people and realizes how f-ed up their priorities are. He sees the good in Gatsby but also realizes that he makes huge mistakes. So, at the end of the book, Nick rejects their shallow New York lifestyle and moves back to the Midwest, older and wiser. He DOES NOT become an alcoholic in a looney bin. This is not a soap opera, Baz Luhrmann! This infuriated me. Also, you don’t need to type important quotes onto the screen just to drive home an important point. So lame.

Also, why was Jordan even included in this version? She was just a brunette with one facial expression whose only purpose seemed to be to tell Nick to invite Daisy to tea. She had no other subplot. They never talked about how she cheated at golf or went on dates with Nick or anything. She just sat next to Daisy on couches and in cars. That’s it. But whatever.

The music annoyed the piss out of me. If you’re going to leave the setting in the 1920s, use 1920s songs. Hearing Jay Z or Florence Welch or whoever else was on this awful soundtrack completely distracted me and took me out of the story. It’s a feeble attempt at keeping the story hip and current and it didn’t make any sense. If Baz had consulted me about the music, WHICH HE TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE, I would have reminded him of Bon Jovi’s theme song to Young Guns. So silly. So 80s. So wrong. Even having current pop stars sing 1920s songs would have been really charming and fun. I know this is one of Baz’s pet things, the modern soundtrack, but it just doesn’t work with this story. Blech.

Okay, so maybe I’m a bit angrier than I thought I was before I started writing this. So let me tell you the positives. Visually the movie is beautiful and fun. The costumes are fab. The party scenes are totally over-the-top but entertaining. Gatsby’s house I thought was too gigantic to even be realistic. It’s a friggin castle on Long Island, somehow. But the scene where he’s showing Daisy around the house and he’s throwing his fancy shirts around is exactly the way I always pictured it. These scenes between them are charming. I wouldn’t say that Leo and Carey have the greatest chemistry. I think Michelle Williams could have done a great job with this part. As I said, it’s hard to make Daisy sympathetic in any way. But Carey’s version doesn’t stand out at all. She’s supposed to be the It Girl, the most popular socialite around. She just doesn’t pull it off. It’s hard to understand why Gatsby is so obsessed with this girl, which is the core of the story.

Now I’m complaining again. But they look perfect for the parts. And in the scenes where Baz played it straight and cut it out with the hip hop and the glitz, he actually came closer to bringing the novel to life than anyone ever has. The confrontation at the Plaza is actually pretty good and tense, and so is the accident scene. Ilsa Fisher did a great job as Tom’s mistress. Casting Leo and Tobey Maguire together was brilliant, since they are real-life BFFs of so many years. Their rapport seems genuine and caring, which is another core element of the story. When Nick tells Gatsby, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,” I believe him.

And Leo is dreamy. He’s maturing very well. He’s not a teen heart-throb anymore, but he’s a handsome grown-up and he’s a fine actor. Usually. This script did him no favors, and he came off sort of wooden. My husband said it seemed like he was reading off cue cards. I think he was a lot better than that. Again, it’s hard to play such an iconic character who doesn’t even seem like a real human. In this version they went for Gatsby as Eternal Optimist and really idealized him, despite his lying and bootlegging. This oversimplifies Gatsby and that is annoying too. This guy created a whole personae for himself that wasn’t real, and it’s tragic to watch his world fall apart. The whole thing is supposed to be a Greek Tragedy, the American Dream gone horribly wrong, where you see the negative consequences of thinking money will bring happiness. Gatsby uses money to win over his true love, but she’s so caught up in her socialite world that she can’t give it all up to be with him. He’s “new money” and that will never fly in her circle of friends. So she stays with Tom, who is the biggest d-bag on earth. Gatsby puts all of his faith in a girl who doesn’t deserve him and he is even willing to get blamed for murder on her behalf. The poor guy is a total sucker.  He just can’t deal with the harsh reality that Daisy and Tom are totally selfish a-holes.

So…yeah. If you love the novel, you will hate this movie. Sorry. But you probably already knew that. If you just want to see a fun movie that’s visually cool and has pretty people in it and has fun music (and you don’t care that the music makes no sense for the plot) then go ahead and see it. I did not, as my husband did, think it was one of the worst movies of all time. It was just extremely disappointing.

Better than the whole damn bunch

It’s daunting to write about my favorite novel. In fact I was afraid to reread it this time. I first read The Great Gatsby in junior year American lit class. I fell in love with the time period, the romantic tone of the book, the legend of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. What’s not to love about the plot: A 1920’s wealthy New York City flapper falls madly in and out of love with a mysterious bootlegger! The bootlegger, flawed but noble, builds his whole life around reuniting with his first love and pursues the American Dream! Of course all of this would appeal to daydreamer bookworm 16-year-old me. I aspired to be a glamorous rich woman living in a huge mansion, relentlessly pursued by the love of my life. That sounded awesome. At that age, I was almost as idealistic and naive as Gatsby. And I considered myself as morally centered and Midwestern (some would say dull) as Nick Carraway.

But as I get older, my life experiences have changed my perspective. Would I, at 33, find Gatsby to be too light of plot or too cynical of human nature or too sentimental about the lost dreams of America’s youth? It was sort of the same fear I felt when reuniting with my first love, as Gatsby does with Daisy. What if, as Nick Carraway says, you can’t recreate the past?

“Of course you can!” Gatsby replies. And in this case, he and Fitzgerald were correct. I admired the writing more than ever. How did Scott write such a compact perfectly structured novel in nine short chapters but still infuse them with lush poetic phrases? Suck it, Hemingway! You got the concise part, but you wouldn’t know poetry or beauty if it punched you in the face! Scott studied his beloved Keats and it paid off big time.

As much as I loved rereading the book, it’s such a quick read that the whole thing flew by. And at first I thought that maybe Daisy wasn’t as much of an awful bitch as I remembered her being. So gorgeous in her long diaphanous white dresses! So charming with her Southern drawl! So in love with Gatsby!

But…wait… She ends up with Tom, her racist white supremacist philandering husband? The guy who punched his mistress and broke her nose just because she said Daisy’s name? Huh? What kind of flaky coward is this woman? I still feel angry about it. There’s not much to admire about Daisy. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for her. In another author’s world, she would have defied her rich family and the social conventions of the time, ran away from home and lived a swinging single life until she reunited with Gatsby, the love of her life. Who would marry Tom Buchanan? What a loser. He’s the mean jock guy from high school who stuffs geeks into lockers just for fun. Staying with Tom is the worst fate I can think of for Daisy. She tortured herself.

Obviously nobody gets a happy ending in this book. It’s sort of a flapper Greek tragedy soaked in gin rickeys. Yum…gin… I could really use a summer cocktail right now. Pregnancy is rough. But anyway, we all know that Gatsby fails in his attempt to win back his first love Daisy. And poor Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, gets run over accidentally by Daisy and gets her boob chopped off. And that d-bag Tom tells Myrtle’s husband that Myrtle was run over with Gatsby’s car, leading the husband to shoot our hero. Gatsby ends up floating dead in his own pool like a 1960s British rock star. So ahead of his time. But what a waste.

As Carraway tells him before he gets shot, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Gatsby’s tragic flaw was that he didn’t realize he was better than Daisy and Jordan and Tom and the rest of those jerks. Daisy wasn’t worth all of this trouble, was she? She was like a 1920’s Lindsay Lohan, shallow and selfish and always blaming someone else for her car accidents. Fitzgerald revealed how careless and cold the rich can be. They never have to face the consequences of their actions. And the bitchy nature of his female characters doesn’t say much about his view of women. Not to play armchair psychologist, but it’s well known that Zelda wasn’t the most mentally stable woman. Did she taint his view of romance? I can’t think of any Fitzgerald story where a happy couple rides off in the sunset together. Love always ends tragically in his world.

And so Gatsby would’ve been better off sticking close to Carraway, the only other likable human being in the novel. They could have gone on a buddy picture road trip back to the Midwest, the land of virtue. He could have met a nice girl on the north shore of Chicago and settled down in a new mansion. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as poetic an ending. Scott wanted to warn everyone about the dangers of valuing money more than human decency. Good job, old sport.

As a writer, I’m still learning from the old sport. Just a couple of days ago someone posted to Facebook this letter that Fitzgerald wrote to an aspiring author. “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.” Okay, so, I’ll just elegantly sum up the political and social atmosphere of my entire generation in a concise 180 pages or so like you did, Scott. No pressure. No problem.