The Great Gatsby (2013)

     After all the reviews to the contrary, I was surprised to find Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby to be (i) an inventive yet faithful adaptation of the narrative, themes and values of the original novel; and (ii) a responsible, meaningful use of 3-D.

     The working title of Citizen Kane, The American, could also apply to the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Like Jay Gatsby (nee Gatz), Welles’s American pursues an incorruptible dream through a sordid world and retains some purity, and achieves immense power but remains ultimately helpless. As Gatsby Leonardo DiCaprio plays an Orson Welles raffishness. He introduces himself with a Harry Lime smile. Like the typical Welles hero, e.g., Kane, Quinlan, Falstaff, Lime, he’s a dreamer whose very success prevents his satisfaction. Gatsby and Kane both begin as poor mid-West folk who achieve great wealth and power but fail to find their peace. Daisy (Carey Mulligan) is another Rosebud. (Luhrmann's 3-D grows out of Welles's deep-focus, but more on that later.)

     Luhrmann’s key change is to have the film’s narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) write the story as therapy back home in a mid-West sanitarium. The lines of handwritten text and the floating letters of the alphabet reiterate the film’s literary source. The clinical setting is justified because Carraway does say he was maddened by his anger at the carelessness of the people around him. As it diagnoses modern life as a destructive fever, the story suits a rehab center.The device also evokes Shakespeare’s line, life being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

     The 3-D amps up that sound and fury to a raucous vacuity and luxurious apathy. The roaring 20s reflect very well upon our whimpering post-meltdown teens. Most obviously, the power of the new 3-D celebrates a technical advance, like Gatsby’s supercharged yellow Rolls Royce, without its destructive end. But it works for more than that. For one thing, the depth becomes a perfect means to expose the partying horde’s shallowness. With so many people and so much luxury crammed into a frame the self-absorbed hedonists shrink into anthills.

     The 3-D serves other purposes. It quietly confirms the uncrossable gap between Gatsby’s new mansion and his dream Daisy’s, her emblematic green light seeming to flash Go but really saying Stop. In the early party scenes the camera swooping down and across from on high shrinks the humans but also implicitly suggests a god’s eye view, a higher judgement. That connects to the old optician’s billboard of the eyeglasses staring out on the coal-hell and the maddened mechanic’s murderous confidence that God sees all, which itself recalls Gatsby’s childhood sense of himself as an omnipotent son of God.

     3-D is offered as an advance in realism but it’s not. Our eyes don’t see depth in real life as extreme as a 3-D shot presents it. Rather it’s another form of expressionism, which is to say it tilts toward psychological rather than physical realism. In long and middle shots 3-D shrinks the human figure. So for the most intimate scenes Luhrmann skips the 3-D pizzazz in favour of a closeup. As the lady committed to profound shallowness says, large parties are intimate; there’s no privacy in small ones.