Gotham Diary:
Great
29 May 2013
What a lot of fuss there has been about Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby. It surprises me that intelligent people are still so worked up about the possibility of fidelity, which is an infantile anxiety for at least three reasons. The first was well-put by LA Times critic Sam Adams: “I don’t want a movie to be great literature any more than I want a novel to be a great salad” (a tweet repeated at The Rumpus). It’s that simple. There is no real possibility of fidelity, even where the illusion of it is intense, as in the great tornado/we’re going to Europe scene in Mr & Mrs Bridge, which treats the text as an absolute scenario. The second problem is that fidelity is in the eye of the beholder, and not remotely objective. My third argument is that an adaptation is intended to refashion something for another purpose. When we go to see a film setting of The Great Gatsby, we do not expect the complete text to be flashed upon the screen. We expect to see things that Fitzgerald did not create. When I went to see The Great Gatsby this afternoon, I expected a Baz Luhrman extravaganza, and I was not disappointed. I found it to be a smashing success.
Now that I am an old man, I have no hesitation about pronouncing The Great Gatsby to be the Great American Novel, nor about refusing to argue the point (for the moment). It seems inherent in the idea of great fiction that several satisfying and plausible but mutually uncongenial, even inharmonious screen adaptations might be generated by it — and that is just as infantile to insist on the best adaptation as it is to worry about fidelity. I regard it as a sign of immaturity to carry about lists of best derivatives, such as performances of operas and, indeed, screen adaptations. I want to allow plenty of room for interpretation, and I will forgive a great deal of manifest infidelity if I am satisfied by the result. The new Gatsby affords an excellent case study in how and how not to judge. In the novel, the second chapter is the dark heart of the novel, because the party at Myrtle’s love nest is unrelievedly sordid; the rot that Fitzgerald wanted to capture is therein presented without any bedizening glamour. It is a nightmare of tedium. As such, it is not promising material for transfer to the screen. There is a Mrs McKee, “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible.” She interrupts Catherine’s story about a trip to Monte Carlo by exclaiming, “I almost married a little kike who’d been after me for years.” About Mr Wilson, Catherine says,
“You were crazy about him for a while.”
“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”
She pointed a finger at me, and every one looked at me accusingly.
These details and others are omitted from the 1974 Jack Clayton adaptation (screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola), as well as from the new movie. But Clayton’s version of the party is straightforwardly naturalistic. This means that we are taken to a party set in 1922 but obviously filmed in the early Seventies. Luhrman’s version could only be Luhrman, and it is a highly stylized (if merely suggestive) orgy. Luhrman omits even more details, but the point is that neither adaptation is interested in the point of the party, which is not Tom’s punching Myrtle in the nose but rather the disordered mood that makes such violence not only possible but likely.
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
I don’t rule out the possibility of following the Fitzgerald’s text as closely as James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala do Evan Connell’s, but I don’t fault Clayton or Luhrman for their less literal accounts. Both movies are hugely entertaining, and both capture the poignance of Gatsby’s misbegotten hope. They deliver the weight and mass of the novel, even if these are distributed over fewer moving parts. Both films do their duty to the text, and then go on to be great movies.
I would give Luhrman the edge for casting. Everyone is superb for Jack Clayton, but Luhrman’s crew is transcendental, as fully prepared to soar beyond naturalism as is Catherine Martin’s production design. And Luhrman manages to glamorize Daisy Buchanan without worshiping her, as Clayton seems to have done with Mia Farrow. (Something tremendously funny/disturbing happened when I watched the Clayton just now, to refresh my recollection of Myrtle’s party. Why did Karen Black’s reading of Myrtle’s little speech about falling in love with Tom on the train remind me so much of Mia Farrow? It came to me, as I left the room, that it was a case of Farrow imitating Black, about fifteen years later, as the title character’s occasionally entranced voluptuary in Woody Allen’s Alice.) Joel Edgerton is as thrilling as I expected him to be: who knew, back when Kinky Boots came out, a mere eight years ago, that its winsome ingénu would develop, in maturity, a trans-Gable degree of assured masculinity? (And yet Edgerton’s weak-kneed wince, when Tom uncovers Myrtle’s corpse, almost makes you forgive the lout everything.) Tobey Maguire is rather more damaged than Sam Waterston, and he succumbs to the madness around him, whereas Waterston (delightfully but typically) distances himself as a genial critic. Leonardo DiCaprio, for all his still smoothness, abounds in active rough edges, as Gatsby must. And Cary Mulligan is wholly substantial as Daisy; she is mortal, not an apparition. (She is also incredibly lovely — I’ve been a fan for ages, but I was almost shocked by how beautiful she is here.)
What about all the racket in the background? I liked it because, for the most part, I hated it — and isn’t it the very point of Fitzgerald’s book that Gatsby’s parties are nightmares? The whole story is a nightmare. If a gangster like Gatsby is worth more than the “rotten crowd” from across the bay, something must be terribly wrong with the world. Nightmares also accommodate extraordinary spectacles; when fireworks and music are used to such dysphoric effect, it’s hard for them to be “excessive.” Gatsby’s chateau couldn’t be more bogus, but you won’t hear any objections from me. (The Buchanan’s place across the water is more subtly off-putting, its excesses disciplined but oppressive.) Nor am I bothered by the extensive CGI footage. Like a great ballet, Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby is completely and brilliantly artificial, except when it needs not to be.
I opted against seeing the movie in 3D, at least for the first time. I didn’t feel that I was missing anything.