...And all that Jazz Age

The Great Gatsby (12a)
Running time 142 minutes
Rating:****
SOME film critics have been getting all het up in recent weeks over director Baz Luhrmann’s take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby, published back in 1925, at the height of the Jazz Age.
There has been dark gossip about ruining a classic American novel, one that sums up the conflicts of a decade that portrayed wild extravagance in parallel with moral rectitude. There have even been cast-away comments suggesting that Luhrmann turned the story into a musical because that’s what he does best (remember Moulin Rouge?).
All of which must be very gratifying for the spirit of the author, who died in 1940, with the book a flop and feeling that his writing career had been a waste of time.
There have been four film attempts at the relatively short novel, the most notable back in 1974 with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in the principal roles – and that was criticised for not portraying the exuberance of the age colourfully enough.
Luhrmann, perhaps responding to that, has put the music, the greed, and the extreme pleasure-seeking, at the heart of his version, and created a wild and wonderful panorama of the American nouveau riche discovering that sin is enjoyable.
It is a simple enough tale. In brief, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo diCaprio) born poor, but ambitious, makes his fortune by luck and ruthlessness, falling for ‘Old Money’ family member Daisy (Carey Mulligan) along the way.
She, however, marries Tom Buchanan, leaving Gatsby to follow her eventually to Long Island, living opposite her home and working to sneak her away from her oafish husband.
Daisy is not as enamoured as he, however, and retreats to the safety of the world she knows, and Gatsby discovers that the American monied classes to which he aspires are just as protective of their privileges as their counterparts in Europe.
The portrayal of the Prohibition age, where American puritans banned the sale or consumption of alcohol in 1919 is superb, using modern party music to demonstrate the timelessness of sexual and moral excess.
He sticks faithfully to the storyline, where the tale is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maquire), a chastened observer of the tragedy, but uses modern special effects and camerawork to give a restless energy to the film, in contrast to the languid pace of the ’74 Redford version.
Judged by recent standards, this is a film about people, rather than things that blow up, with meaningful dialogue delivered by skilful actors. DiCaprio in particular is superb as the brittle Gatsby, yearning for a place in a world that he can almost grasp, but finds is constantly just out of reach, because of his birth.
The Great Gatsby is well worth seeing and likely to be most rewarding to those who leave any preconceptions at home.