Film News: The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann

Great Scott! Baz Luhrmann divides the

critics….. Again.

“You can’t repeat the past,” warned Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby. Ah, yes you can Nick.

If there’s one guarantee when it comes to the films of Baz Luhrmann – from Romeo and Juliet to Moulin Rouge and Australia - it’s that they’ll be big, bombastic and spectacular and the critics’ knives will be out to slice and dice the result. There aren’t many directors quite so polarizing as our Baz.

And so history repeats itself with Luhrmann’s glitzy 3D adaptation of Gatsby opening this week stateside (and the coveted opener next week at Cannes Film Festival) and some cutting reviews – some wallowing in the vitriolic – preceding it. At issue once again is the director’s flamboyant, over the top approach (said to have cost $180 million) to the notoriously difficult to adapt story of the American dream in decline, love unquenched and dripping excess.

 “When it comes to Baz Luhrmann and his style, it’s hard not to have such a strong opinion…… He seems to freely embrace the fact that he’s a polarising director. Clearly he’s decided that this is his niche.”

Kenneth Turan of the LA Times writes that the film is Luhrmann’s “excuse to display his frantic, frenetic personal style. A filmmaker who has increasingly made a fetish of excess and a religion of artificiality, Luhrmann and his team pile on the spectacle and the glitter until we are gasping for air.”



On the set of The Great Gatsby



Salon.com brands this Gatsby “debauchery in Disneyland”, its critic Andrew O’Hehir suggesting it could “go down in history as a legendary flop.” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers gives the film just one star lamenting a “crushing disappointment” that would have F. Scott Fitzgerald turning in his grave.

Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly labeled Luhrmann “the caffeinated conductor” lamenting a perceived preference for style over substance;

“He'd rather blast your retinas into sugar-shock submission.”

Meanwhile The New York Observer’s Rex Reed was baying for blood;

“You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann,” he said.

And The New Yorker’s David Denby who describes Luhrmann’s Gatsby as “a flimsy phantasmagoria” wasn’t much kinder;

 “Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste,” he wrote.



Does style trump substance?



Speaking about the Luhrmann polarizing effect, The Week’s entertainment editor Scott Meslow told The Daily Beast;

 “When it comes to Baz Luhrmann and his style, it’s hard not to have such a strong opinion…… He seems to freely embrace the fact that he’s a polarising director. Clearly he’s decided that this is his niche.”

Back in 2008, when Luhrmann’s Australia was facing the wrath of the critics he was circumspect telling Reuters;

“When you do what I do, you expect to be covered in mud.”

But Luhrmann wasn’t about to take the barbs lying down either firing back at his critics.

"They hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema,” he said. “They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die."'

Singer and actor Brendan Maclean who briefly appears in Gatsby came out in defense of his director this week opining in The Australian that Luhrmann’s penchant for flamboyant rather than “hard hitting films about life in the suburbs” (a staple of the Australian film industry) and judgment of the man rather than the merits of his movies was behind the bile;

“When it comes to Baz, it seems more than a few critics are more than happy to cross the line between evaluating his ability and just not liking the man…..Let's hope these critics will do their job of critiquing the film and not simply the man behind the camera.”

Despite the backlash, Maclean and Luhrmann should take comfort in some positive reviews from US critics from praise of the cast (Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Dasy Buchanan, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan), the effective use of 3D and the impressive production design of Luhrmann’s wife Catherine Martin.

The New York Times influential film critic A.O Scott while having his reservations called The Great Gatsby “big and noisy” but “eminently enjoyable”. In what sounds like a back handed compliment he labels it “gaudily and grossly inauthentic” but says that’s fitting given the same is true of the film’s central character.

Lou Lumenick of The New York Post writes that the film “is the first must-see film of Hollywood’s summer season, if for no other reason than its jaw-dropping evocation of Roaring ’20s New York — in 3-D, no less………a movie that may not be truly great but certainly stands out like a beacon in a sea of silly blockbusters.”

Newsday’s Rafer Guzman calls the adaptation “an audacious and worthy attempt,” while Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter says it’s “endlessly extravagant” and “vibrantly alive”;

“The cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed,” says McCarthy.

But putting the critical maelstrom into perspective, we’ll leave the final word to the very pragmatic Scott Foundas of entertainment bible Variety;

“To accuse Luhrmann of overkill is a bit like faulting a leopard for his spots,” he writes. “Love it or hate it, take it or leave it, this is unmistakably his 'Gatsby' through and through.”

The Great Gatsby opens May 30.