Gatsby Revisited

With the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s latest effort doing the rounds on Facebook, it seemed appropriate to watch the film which precedes it, and which boasts an equally impressive cast: Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. Of course, I could have reread the book which precedes it, but that seems pointless, we’re in the world of film not literature, and alas, I did not do A-Level English.

The Luhrmann trailer indicates that 2012’s Great Gatsby will be bursting with (insipid) frivolity. Two screenshots I feel typify what the film will entail. Take this New York skyline for example:

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was grabbed from a video game, let’s say: Grand Theft Auto: Steam Punk Edition (they’ve even gone to the effort of rendering a zeppelin!). It looks so entirely fake that we’d be hard pushed to care about any of the inhabitants of this place, but there you are, this is what we’ve been so shown and we have to make do. What follows in the trailer is a series of vignettes saturated with gargantuan decadence. It’s fun, camp, and pointless. For example:

Look at all those Martini glasses, all nine of them! Neatly arranged on piled up books. It looks like a bad fashion advertisement. Perhaps this is all self-conscious. Perhaps the booze has been given centre stage, and the characters sidelined, in order to enhance the shallowness of their lives. 3-D cinematography juxtaposed with 2-D characters etc.  But I doubt it. The trailer revels in what it depicts, and we are invited to do the same. Wonderful rococo escapism while the world goes through yet another recession.

All this is so utterly and completely antithetical to the 1974 effort, which Vincent Canby lamented was “as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool”. Whilst I wouldn't wholly subscribe to this view, I can see where he's coming from. But it’s prosaic tone is certainly more preferable to the one Luhrmann employs. It allows room for tension, it doesn’t condescend the audience by shoving their faces into the extravagance on show, and as a result, lets us breathe with the characters. Even so, in order to fully appreciate it, reading the novel is a prerequisite. This begs the question: why bother filming the book at all? Surely not to help all those teenage pupils get the grades they need by putting the least amount of work in as possible..