F. Scott Fitzgerald famously walked out of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation’s 1926 version. But, this Warner Bros. Pictures’ 3-D version is resonating in some amazing quarters.
Charles Scribner III, great grandson of Fitzgerald’s publisher, for one, “loved the film.” (The trailer had signaled its “Zeffirellian vision and energy.”) Scribner followed in the family tradition, republishing The Great Gatsby with that iconic cover in 1979. More than that, he’s an art historian, which gives him an added dimension by which to judge the film. Great film, after all, is great art.
Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, writer and filmmaker Eleanor “Bobbie” Lanahan, loved it, too. The other night, Luhrmann said, it “took my breath away” when this “quite regal” woman “came up to me and she took my hand and said, “I’ve come all the way from Vermont and I wanted to see what you did to my grandfather’s book.” Her review? “I do feel Scott would have been proud,” she said, and later wrote to Luhrmann for clarity’s sake. “It’s got tragedy and comedy and character.” Furthermore, she said, “The movie took little away from the book, but added to it. For me, it is the first time I truly felt sympathy for Gatsby on film.” But what Luhrmann found most touching was when she said, “I think you proved that first person narrative can, in fact, be translated to film.” He jotted this down “because,” he said, “others have said about her grandfather’s books, that first person narrative can’t translate to film.”
While Lanahan made him feel proud on behalf of his entire 300-member team, including his wife Catherine Martin, two-time Oscar winner for set and costume design; Luhrmann said, most of all, he was “happy that we had not wasted our time.” They spent two long years on “very, very deep living and considerate research of Scott and Zelda’s life and the world of The Great Gatsby.” In short, they lived Fitzgerald! “By the way,” Luhrmann added, “We are research nuts and love that part of the process.”
But, Hollywood being Hollywood, not all the reviews have been glowing. “I made Moulin Rouge, so I’m used to that kind of battering,” said Luhrmann. Fitzgerald himself endured withering reviews. H.L. Mencken famously described The Great Gatsby as “trivial and shallow.”
The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde, as well, failed to see the art. In “How Many Flappers Make a Flop?,” he cleverly opens with this humorous, if largely gratuitous, observation: “F. Scott Fitgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ tells the story of a man with a shady past who is willing to waste countless millions of dollars in the pursuit of love and respect, so it’s no surprise that the story has constantly proven to be catnip for people in the movie business.”
While Duralde might be the smartest guy in the room, his review is not. He pans Luhrmann’s “soaring, candy-colored phantasmagoria” then flops, himself, with this soaring prediction: “This film marks the official moment in which Baz Luhrmann’s signature style has become self-parody. So we beat on, boats against the current, jumping the shark.”
Admittedly, without the proper, ahem, perspective, it’s easy enough to miss the art and nuance. Toby Maguire, in Scribner’s view, is “even more FSF in style and looks (than Sam Waterston in Paramount’s ‘74 classic). So FSF—deliberately here reincarnated as narrator—that despite being a Yalie he wears a near replica of a Princeton Cottage Club bow tie during the party scene.” Furthermore, “DiCaprio IS Gatsby, par excellence.” Scribner, more than anyone, should know.
Most presciently, Scribner observes, the film, itself, is not so much a “translation” of the book but “an operatic transfiguration of the novel into film… (and) is to our novel what Verdi’s late-Romantic Otello is to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan play; it must be judged on its own plane as a distinct recreation in another medium, a parallel universe so to say.”
As for his “transfiguration,” Luhrmann said “any work of literature changed into another medium… you have to decode in that medium.” But Fitzgerald opened up wider possibilities. “Historically,” said Luhrmann, “Fitzgerald was really obsessed with the medium of film himself. He was experimenting with how to write a screenplay” and put “cinematic form such as the montage and jump cut into his books.” This, said Luhrmann, “(inspired) me to look at doing it in 3-D.”
Regarding the critics, and “whether people agree with what I’ve done or not,” Luhrmann wants them to know, “every decision came from” that deep research. “It wasn’t flippant. It didn’t come from nothing.”
For example, he did not just muse, “Wouldn’t it be groovy to put hip hop in Gatsby?” Rather, it came directly from the creator. “Fitzgerald himself,” he said, “took African American street music, put it in the front and center of his novel,” which is what made the novel “in ’25 immediate and exciting and dangerous.” So, Luhrmann said, he had to ask himself, “If Fitzgerald was making a movie, what African American street music might he use? And today we live in ‘The Hip Hop Age,” whereas when he lived he called it ‘The Jazz Age’.” (Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1922 as he began writing The Great Gatsby.)
Scribner, himself, noted “the depth of thought and detail Luhrmann so clearly brought to his production” in the huge altarpiece of ‘The Resurrection’ by “so-called Cecco del Caravaggio [Francesco Boneri], an obscure artist about which we know almost nothing” except his relationship to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, “the greatest dramatic painter of the Baroque…” The fact that this painting, appropriately housed in Chicago’s Art Institute, “command(s) the central place in the great hall of Gatsby’s mansion” signified to Scribner “a resurrection into a new level of existence—Gatsby’s dream, as it were.” At the New York Public Library luncheon the day after the film’s May 1 premiere, Luhrmann affirmed that this classic painting showed “Gatsby as a Messianic figure.”
“So we beat on, boats against current”—or sharks, as the case may be, while Fitzgerald’s novel flies off the shelf and theatergoers come out in droves to enjoy The Great Gatsby as never before.
