In
my younger and more vulnerable years, I first crossed paths with the haunted
Jazz Age fantasia that is The Great Gatsby.
As so many had before me (and as so many have after me), I first read
Gatsby during my sophomore year of high school, in that most dreaded teenage
academic playground that is American Literature. The book was firmly nestled in
the spring of my 16th year, removed just enough from the autumnal
reading of The Catcher in the Rye and winter’s excursion with The Old Man and
the Sea; it served as almost a gateway into the world of short fiction and
poetry that would close the year. I
still have vivid memories of staring deep into the Francis Cugat painting that
adorns the classic version of the cover, the nocturnal landscape it portrayed
both enticing and forboding.
It
was a great year in my life for book covers and mystery. I knew almost nothing about Catcher in the
Rye, save for its notorious reputation, so when I first cracked open its pages,
I became preoccupied with that spartan magenta cover. It immediately brought to mind the ethos of
the brown paper wrapper, of illicit objects clandestinely sent in the mail,
objects whose true nature was not to be seen by the eyes of the young. For me, Catcher held the promise of the most
explosive and titillating obscenities; even though I was reading it in the
confines of a fairly straight Catholic school, I convinced myself that someone
had slipped up and inadvertently allowed transgressive smut to be added to the
curriculum (I had experienced a similar occurrence in 7th grade,
while attending a conservative Lutheran grade school, when, in the school’s
library, I happened upon a dust jacket-deprived hardback copy of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Stories That Scared Even Me, a nasty short story collection which
dealt in matters such as demonic temptresses, graphically violent mutated
fish-men and homicidal children.
Subsequently, I became its most ardent borrower; it was a seminal
literary experience and my own little secret in that morally strict
microcosmos.)
So
it was that in the span of three days, I dashed through Salinger’s
bindungsroman, waiting for an orgy to break out deep within its pages, or for
Holden Caulfield to begin his inevitable killing spree. The fact that neither of these events
occurred was mildly disappointing. Still,
my immersion in Holden’s mind was thrilling.
I had lived most of my formative years hewing close to the rules (of
school, of home, of society), so to have a character give such profane voice to
my latent anti-social desires was a moment of clarity and revelation.
But
the heart on a sleeve existence of Catcher and its seemingly smutty cover were
merely a preamble for the deep mysteries which lay within Cugat’s Gatsby
cover. Once again embracing the
possibilities of mystery, I knew almost nothing of the inhabitants of East Egg,
West Egg, old Manhattan and the Valley of the Ashes before I embarked on my
literary journey to meet their denizens, so that iconic cover image served as a
possible harbinger of glamor and danger.
My parents had raised me in a rich literary heritage, always providing
me with a diverse and often preternaturally advanced slate of books and
magazines, so without knowing it, I shared with Nick Carraway the sense of
existing in two worlds at once. I loved
the classics, but I also thrilled to reading of the kayfabed exploits of
professional wrestlers; subsequently, the best of my friends were blood
brothers, but I often related better to adults.
The intimate revelations of young men (or at least the terms in which they
express them) may, indeed, be usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious
suppressions, but the intimate recesses of the heart of a young man raised in
such disparate worlds are also fantastic breeding grounds for a love of the
unknown, a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, a susceptibility to
maudlin idealism. So though I knew
little of the contents within Gatsby, that Cugat cover beckoned to me from my
desk, those penetrating, ghostly eyes floating in the night like the romantic
visions that passed through my dreams.
But
wait, we’re here to talk about Baz Lurhmann’s new film adaptation of The Great
Gatsby, right? Well, yes. But as the sharp-eyed among you will have
noticed from the previous paragraph, Gatsby has never just been a book to
me. True, on that first teenage reading,
it was the tragic romantic odyssey that I was so accustomed to from the
pulps…and from the world of the squared circle.
But it quickly mutated into a Burroughsian word virus, one that has
continued to evolve throughout my life.
During my first exposure to Fitzgerald’s viral heartbreaker, I solely identified with Gatsby himself. Here, finally, was one of the great modern precursors to the romantic philosophy that been instilled in me by years of classic film, cartoons and the like. And what youthful dreamer wouldn’t find himself in the former Jimmy Gatz? Here was a good looking roughneck who literally sacrificed everything for the idealized object of his desire. Isn’t this what romance was supposed to be to a teen, let alone one whose perceptions had been so finely tuned to life’s mixture of the sacred and profane? And so, I endeavored to recreate Gatsby’s life in my own, pining after young ladies who resided just out of my reach, knowing that only those who required a Grail quest were worthy of that hazy and ultimate attainment.
At
this point of the narrative, some of you will be pointing out the obvious irony
of the aforementioned line about young men and their plagiaristic
revelations. And to you I ask this:
haven’t you ever been a teenager?
In
any case, my dream of the life of Trimalchio was rudely fractured several times
by females quite more pragmatic than I.
These experiences, while rough, also toughened me a bit. But I still clung to Gatsby’s dreamy sense of
the possibilities of the impossible. And
that, in large part, was because I refused to read Gatsby as the novel it was,
only as the one I wanted it to be.
Indeed, it wasn’t until a sophomore level college course that I finally
came around to the underbelly of Gatsby’s dream, how Fitzgerald constantly
undercuts the flightiness and doomed obsession of his quest, even as he
simultaneously paints it in the most dazzling of veneers. And so the virus mutated further. And then, one fine morning in the fall of my
23rd year, I realized that my Gatbsyesque romantic longings were a
fool’s game, one with only heartbreak and ruin as the prize. So I hardened my resolve toward life, stopped
letting others dictate the potential happiness of my flights of fancy.
Or,
at least, I did for the most part.
The
spring of my 28th year brought a new evolution in this virus, one
which brought final realization of with which character I truly
identified. For by that point, due to my
tendency to reserve judgment, many curious natures had opened themselves to me,
and I had become the victim of not a few veteran bores. I became aware of how I attracted such a wide
cross section of friends, many times including the enemies of enemies. And with this sense of openness came the
acceptance that while Gatsby’s dreams may have been the more classically
gallant pursuit, I was Nick Carraway through and through: still open to the
possibility for transcendence in life, but also wryly aware of the riotous,
often calamitous excursions of the human heart.
Feel
free dear reader, if you so wish, to insert boilerplate copy about God’s Lonely
Man at this point of your perusal of these words. But also be aware that it should be saved for
an excursion into the universal allure of Travis Bickle to a confused young
man, one which will have to be pursued at another time.
And
so, if the past is indeed prologue, then how to approach an essay on the state
of nostalgia which focuses on the new version of a classic tale steeped in such
nostalgic longings? Or, moreover, is it
possible to approach Baz Lurhmann’s Gatsby as a work both of and apart from the
pull of the past, as a realization of Fitzgerald’s prose but also a new work in
and of itself? I can’t promise to fully
answer these questions, dear reader…but I can try.
It’s
appropriate that an adaptation of the greatest modern nostalgia narrative just
west of Proust has been steeped in debate over its fidelity to the past. There is, of course, Jack Clayton’s somewhat
derided, yet still respected 1974 film adaptation with which to tangle. Yes, Gatsby was twice filmed before the
tastefully glittery Robert Redford vehicle, but it is this one which has
resonated most (even in its limited manner) and for the longest time in the
popular consciousness. My fond nostalgic
narrative includes a brief chapter set in that star-crossed high school English
class, during which we watched the 1974 Gatsby.
My teacher was very much an older woman unstuck in time, a sage lady
whose murky past served as a matter of juvenile mystery and fascination for us
(Had she really been a nun? Had she left
the nunnery for marriage? Was the lurid
tale of her fiancée jilting her at the altar true? It couldn’t be; it was too fantastical. But still…)
On that final day of the film, the end of school bell rung as the
credits began to roll. Naturally, my
classmates beat a hasty retreat for the exit, but I stayed behind to savor the
final images. Say what you will about
this version of the story, but its opening and end credits, bracketed by the
strains of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” (with its invocation of the divine
romance that “tis broken and cannot be mended”) and briefly mixed with the
similar 20’s standard “Ain’t We Got Fun?” (the twin Sisyphean questions that
lie at the heart of the narrative) offer one of the truest evocations of
Fitzgerald’s spirit: the grand vista of Gatsby’s manor, now a haunted house of
fetishized objects with no humanity to embrace them. Those fleeting moments at the film’s
conclusion (and really, classmates of my past, was it too much to ask for two
more minutes of your time?) spent with that wise, aging lady gave me a sense of
kinship with whatever truth lay behind the mysteries of her existence; no
matter how melodramatically troubled her past may or may not have been, these
few moments in the present bonded her, if ever so briefly, with a punk kid who usually
sat in the back of the room, snarkily jabbing at the imagined inferiors who sat
around him.
Perhaps
the main criticism of the 1974 Gatsby is that it shares too much of a kinship
with its eponymous hero: it looks the part in spades, but there’s a nagging
feeling that there’s not much beneath the surface. The sets are naturalistically gorgeous, the
costumes period accurate. The script hews
closely to Fitzgerald’s prose. I’ve
always enjoyed the blank appeal of Mia Farrow as Daisy, her doe eyes peering
through fog filters like those melancholic ones that peer through the night in
the Cugat cover, her canned laugh an alluring replication of the hollow,
money-filled one of the book. I have
several friends who view Bruce Dern’s Tom Buchanan as an act of heresy against
the book, what with his beanpole physique and nasally voice. But I’ve always admired the deep recesses of
condescension that Dern was able to summon forth; he might not look like
Fitzgerald’s Tom, but the spirit of that old-moneyed bully seems to have fully
possessed him. And at the heart of the
film lies Redford’s Gatsby, seemingly the perfect actor for this seemingly
perfect construct of a man. In his
prime, Redford’s boyish charm and smoldering good looks were his calling card,
but he could also project a frozen blankness (similar to that Farrow could
conjure) that could both help and hurt him.
I’ve always been a fan of his work, but there have been many times when
I felt as if his screen visage was holding me at a distance; I could admire his
acting chops, but I’d never be privy to the delights of his Aspen nights. (Ironically enough, his classic run of
collaborations with Paul Newman may have provided the truest depiction of
unfettered romance in his career.) But
there’s very much a feeling of suppressed tastefulness about the film. In so many ways, it’s the Gatsby of Gatsby
adaptations: so beautiful to view, so easy to admire, yet so hard to
passionately love.
Cue
the critics of Lurhmann’s Gatsby, those who would wield the cudgel of style
over substance against it. But let’s
relegate them to the rear of the stage for a moment, for addressing criticism
as a primary concern before addressing admiration is mostly a futile endeavor.
And
also because I was primed to be a critic of the new Gatsby. It was easy to hear the words “Lurhmann”
“Gatsby” and “3D” and think that mindless excess was on the way. Well, it was easy if, like me, you hadn’t
actually seen a Lurhman film at that point.
Subsequently, I finally watched his Romeo and Juliet, appreciating it as
a kinetic and thoroughly modern take on a story that has too often become
calcified in time. And then I saw that
first trailer for his Gatsby, a phantasmagoric haze of iconic moments set to a
Jack White cover of U2’s “Love is Blindness”, and my hope for something different
was renewed.
Hope,
that great and horrible concept that drives Fitzgerald’s novel, was also at the
heart of his inspiration for the book.
In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, he stressed his hope that he could
create “something new-something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and
intricately patterned.” It’s this
aspiration that has driven many a reader to a passionate engagement with Gatsby,
as it views the Jazz Age world (and the eternal world) in terms that are so
simple, yet so complex.
So
it was that I (a confirmed 3D agnostic) sat front and center at the first
multidimensional screening of the film, ready to take the plunge into the heart
of its riotous excursions. And plunge is
the most fitting term for this new Gatsby, for in its full stereoscopic version
(ably abetted by Simon Duggan’s stylish lensing) it is a deep and giddy dive
into all that is gaudy and extravagant and haunting and heartbreaking about the
story. And it all begins with snow, the
seeming antithesis of the Gatsby experience.
For
if the 1974 version suffered somewhat from being so focused on all matters
Gatsby, this version is truly Nick Carraway’s tale. Some have been critical of Lurhmann’s framing
device, in which Nick lives up to his Fitzgeraldian influence by recovering
from those tumultuous days in the East at a sanatarium, morbid alcoholism chief
among the doctoral concerns surrounding our narrator. But it perfectly captures what the 1974
version struggled to: the knowledge that these are Nick’s winter dreams (to
quote another Fitzgerald story) that we’re privy to, children of his
subconscious that exist as both fantasy and nightmare. And so, the dynamic first hour of the film as
master class in sensory overload, Gatsby’s first party in particular matching
the most excessive and bling-drenched glories of modern hip hop bashes (hence
the anachronistic soundtrack choices….here, I could go on and on in debate over
the seeming appropriateness of Lurhmann’s musical philosophy, but you, dear
reader, are fully entitled to not groove on this aspect of his craft. The 1974 Gatsby still exists for your viewing
pleasure.) The late Tony Scott would
have swooned over the undulating curtains in the Buchanan sitting room,
virtually characters in their own right that aren’t so much beholden to photorealism
as to Nick’s heady sense memories. I was
particularly struck by the depiction of Ewing Klipspringer as not the eccentric
pianist of the book but the mad pipe organist of Gatsby’s bacchanalia, long and
stringy hair blanketing his manic features, perhaps recalling the late, great
William Finley’s Phantom of the Paradise (or Guy Pearce’s pre-Extremis-infused
uber-nerd Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3….quite the season for stringy haired
geek geniuses we’re having, no?)
And
what is Nick’s tale without Nick himself (hmmm….does that make sense? Ah, run with it, reader.) No matter what reservations I had about
Lurhmann’s Gatsby, the casting of Tobey Maguire as Nick struck me as a perfect
choice. It’s been Maguire’s seeming
wide-eyed naivete (the reverse negative of Mia Farrow’s glacial stare) that has
been his stock in trade; it’s what both blessed and eventually cursed his
depiction of Peter Parker in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man cycle. Nick’s eventual disillusionment with the
world of the East can’t reach its full bloom without the first flush of
infatuation to precede it, and it’s this aspect of his personality that Maguire
fully captures; he’s the ultimate blank slate on which the audience can project
their sympathies (while also being aware that they’re projecting those
sympathies onto a constructed memory.)
Even though Maguire is older than Sam Waterston was when he filled the
same role in the 1974 version, the former web-slinger maintains a sense of
slowly fading boyishness that the future Law and Order star didn’t quite have
so many years ago. And this is key,
because Nick enters the world of New York as somewhat of a precocious man-child
and exits as a broken adult. Indeed,
Lurhmann may list morbid alcoholism as chief among Nick’s ailments, but the
films overwhelmingly gives the impression (true to the source text) that the
tendency to booze it up is only a surface symptom of Nick’s deeper illness: a
heart and soul that have been torn at by too many suitors.
What
of the central romantic triangle, though?
I’ve often run hot and cold on Leo DiCaprio, his tendency to rely on the
same set of actorly ticks and mannerisms in each role an intermittent source of
frustration. But like his old running
buddy Tobey (maybe the casting was all a bit of meta-commentary by Lurhmann),
Leo maintains a distant whiff of youthful elan, which makes him well suited for
a character that, in many ways, is still a kid playing dress up. His much-discussed initial reveal, in which
his hypnotic, charismatic visage, backgrounded by fireworks and the climactic
strains of “Rhapsody in Blue”, seduces Nick and the audience, is yet another
fantasy-infused moment of Nick’s memories.
By some of the best laughs of the film also come from how self-aware and
awkward Gatsby can be. Much as
Fitzgerald undercut his hero from the early going, so too does Lurhmann not let
the audience forget the essential contradiction at the heart of this most
aspirational of characters. But
DiCaprio’s natural magnetism ensures that the audience never totally gives up
on him, much as Nick can’t bring himself to totally abandon Gatsby (whom, in
the book’s phenomenal first two pages, Nick essentially describes as both
everything he loved and loathed about his time in the big city.)
Whereas
Mia Farrow projected an ice queen demeanor in 1974, Carey Mulligan brings an
altogether different flatness to Daisy’s affect. Mulligan has specialized in playing refined
yet troubled young women, so Daisy is not too much of a creative leap for
her. But her physicality also brings a
subtle toughness to the role that contrasts with Farrow’s fragile beauty. You can believe that she resides “high in a
white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl”, but she also captures the
earthy St. Louis upbringing that is key to Daisy’s past. Lurhmann does all he can to humanize her
character, although it struck me that he may have gone a bit too far. One of the most heart-rending aspects of the
book is how Fitzgerald also deconstructs Daisy from the outset. At the conclusion of his first dinner at the Buchanan’s, Nick
feels as if he’s been used as a pawn by the bickering couple, and his
descriptions of Daisy are fond, while still being aware of the contradictory
gaps in her being. It’s all
foreshadowing for his eventual realization of what drives her, so caustically
evoked at the climax of the ill-fated Plaza Hotel confrontation when Daisy’s
eyes fall on Nick and Jordan “with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at
last what she was doing-and as though she had never, all along, intended doing
anything at all.” Mulligan’s Daisy goes
through these motions, but the exclusion of this line (in a film that excels at
referencing most of the key structural quotes from the book) gives the viewer
the impression that Gatsby’s violent lashing out at Tom is the breaking point
for her.
Joel
Edgerton’s Tom shares much the same qualities as Mulligan’s Daisy. Here, finally, is a hulking, physically
intimidating brute to match Fitzgerald’s bullying antagonist. But here, also, is an actor (and a script)
capable of expressing the confused humanity of the character. Gatsby may be the primary quixotic figure of
the book, but Tom is as much a doomed a dreamer as his romantic rival, haunted
by his past collegiate glories, grasping at stale and racist ideas in an
attempt to hold onto something in his advancing middle years, suffering from
the hot whips of panic as he drives to New York, his mistress and his wife
potentially fading away from him.
Throughout these developments, Edgerton maintains the delicate balance
between brooding aggression and wounded emotional groping, a tough act to pull
off for anyone filling this role. But as
with Daisy, Lurhmann seems to want to push the audience’s sympathies for Tom a
hair too far. In particular, the
galvanizing moment when Tom brutally strikes his mistress Myrtle in their
Manhattan apartment is undercut by Lurhmann immediately pulling the camera outside,
where Nick is taking in the tragic allure of the city. Nick’s ultimate indictment of Tom and Daisy
as scheming children, “careless people (who) smashed up things and creatures
and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or
whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess
they had made” remains in the script, but the couple never quite come across as
the semi-monstrous beings that they are at the book’s conclusion (a depiction
that rings as somewhat ironic in the confines of Nick’s larger than life
memories.) But then again, Nick’s final
indictment in the text is also preceded by an admission that he couldn’t
forgive or like Tom, but that everything he did was entirely justified to
him. Perhaps pity ultimately fills
Nick’s heart more than contempt, and perhaps that’s what the film is aiming for
in the ambiguity it injects into this storyline.
There
is one more Gatsby character who has long intrigued me, and that is the hard,
jaunty golf-cheat Jordan Baker. Nick’s
relationship with Jordan is ostensibly at the heart of the book, but it’s also
painted in deep shades of ambiguity. He’s
deeply attracted to and repulsed by her, so it’s often hard to figure how the
blankness she brings to the narrative figures into the grand scheme of things
(aside from serving to as a quasi-Ariadne in the midst of Gatbsy’s labyrinth…and
to provide key plot details heretofore unavailable to the reader and
Nick.) Elizabeth Debecki ably fills this
role, her sculpted features alluring, her serpentine physicality and sly,
winking visage a source of great and sexy amusement. But any romance with Nick is mostly left up
to the audience’s imagination (patrons of the “Nick is gay” school of thought
will be disappointed to know that although an effete McKee does, in fact,
materialize in the orgastic atmosphere of Tom’s apartment, the inebriated Nick wakes
up the next morning not by the photographer’s bed but on his own front
porch.) And because of this, Nick’s
ultimate rebuke of her, his admonition that “I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and
call it honor” is reduced to him brushing her off at Tom’s door the night of
Myrtles death with a more open ended “I’m done with this.” Perhaps my slight disappointment with this
omission is once again due to the novel’s mutating viral effect on me. For though I abandoned chasing after the
Daisys of the world in my mid-twenties, I’ve since been romantically enthralled
by more than my share of Jordans. I've sometimes stared into the night, haunted by the icy remove of their natures, gazing for their eyes up in that deep, inky beyond.
But
alas, dear reader, I’ve prattled on too long.
At this point, you’re probably asking yourself if you’d have been better
off devoting your time to just seeing the damn movie. And perhaps I’m just in my boat, beating
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my past, and the book’s past,
and our collective past in this fever dream review of a fever dream of a film
about a fever dream of an existence. But
maybe, in the end, dreams are the only solid buoys we have in this sea of
life. Or maybe, to dip once again into
youthful plagiarism, life is but a dream, sweetheart. So good night, dear reader. Pleasant living.
