REVIEW - THE GREAT GATSBY

It's an extremely expensive, extremely ambitious one, no doubt, but Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is little more than a blatant cash grab. Mimicking his own Moulin Rouge as far as it will take him, and virtually shutting down once that strategy has worn its welcome, his supposed unique, fresh take on an old classic instead feels stale and curiously familiar. I suppose the devil's in the details of Catherine Martin's luscious designs, but there's so damn much of everything that Luhrmann homogenises the visual elan and renders it crass - he's more about capturing a spirit, but he spoils all the artistry in Martin's work, turning glamour into gaudiness, and diminishing the splendour. He's making yet another epic romance, which I suppose is how the masses regard F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel; it's no such thing - Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan are two vacuous, filthy rich fools who've barely met and certainly never loved. He's in love with something intangible, that glowing green light, and is too frustrated with himself to ever love with the kind of abandon a true tragic romance requires. She's just not capable of love at all. The more Luhrmann tries to heighten the melodrama, the more its fragility becomes apparent, and the more futile his efforts appear. He's distracting us from the real show, one which, when he allows the film to fully embrace it, sends these sights and sounds hurtling towards you with all the panache in the world. You've heard of turning it up to eleven - Gatsby's grand entrance may convince you that no-one but Baz even knows where eleven is. Leonardo DiCaprio ruins his decent performance with a heinous accent, while Carey Mulligan projects an intelligence that not even an actor of Alec Guinness' skill could conceal, and thus is inherently wrong for the role of Daisy. The film's dullness is secured by an overly literate approach, with narration accompanied by flashbacks, events shown, recounted, shown again, related before they've occurred on screen or explained after. The anachronistic soundtrack is a barefaced gimmick, and Lana Del Rey's song is shoved repeatedly down one's ear canals in one form or another.