The party itself was swell: cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at Henry & Oscar's, the swanky supper club in Belltown owned by Mark and Katie Stern. Then a stroll down to The Big Picture for a preview screening of The Great Gatsby on the theater's new state-of-the-art digital system. A glass of Prosecco and a tub of the white cheddar popcorn, so far, so good, and highly recommended.
Pity that the much-hyped film itself proved to be such a fizzle, bummer, dud and disappointment. As cinema, it's lush but vapid; as a movie, it's a balk, all windup and no delivery. And it's loooong, almost two and a half hours, so there's plenty of time for set pieces on Long Island (those spectacular parties!), in Noo Yawk City (skyscrapers! drama!) interspersed with transitions designed for 3-D viewing.
Director Baz Luhrmann's from egalitarian Australia, so it's understandable that he might not have a feel for the subtle nuances of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. This wasn't an issue in his terrific movie from 2001, Moulin Rouge, which was all about artifice. Gatsby, on the other hand, is about social commentary, about the subtleties of class distinctions, and here Luhrmann is just plain heavy-handed.
Everything is over the top: the parties, the music, the cars, the houses, the dialog (far too many "Old Sport"s out of Leonardo diCaprio). Luhrmann sanitizes the role of Meyer Wolfsheim, the toad-like Jewish gangster who's the well-spring of all the evil in the novel, by giving the part to Amitabh Bachchan, a beloved Indian actor who barely gets one scene, and by removing all traces of Fitzgerald's anti-Semitism (except for a single, fleeting reference to "that Kike"). Where Gatsby himself is supposed to be both mysterious and lovable, DiCaprio plays him as aloof. As Daisy, the girl of his dreams, British actress Carey Mulligan is chirpy and clueless. As Nick, the story's narrator, Toby Maguire looks like he's waiting around for the cameras to roll on his next Spider-Man flick.
Luhrmann's worst offense, though, is that he takes the book's title literally: he treats Gatsby's pitiful, self-loathing, hopeless schemes as worthy of admiration, of greatness. He completely misses Fitzgerald's irony and creates, in its stead, an inadvertent portrait of modern manners: the director as charlatan.
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