Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby is set to hit the silver screen tonight though early reviews have already begun grabbing headlines. Lurhmann is known for writing, directing, and producing sweeping epics driven by eye-catching aesthetics and quick-cut scenes, and Gatsby doesn’t appear to deviate from his preferred style.
Gatsby stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role alongside Tobey Maguire as the unsuspecting Nick Carraway. Carey Mulligan plays the elegant though rebellious Daisy Buchanan and her husband is Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan. Rap mogul Jay-Z produced the soundtrack and is billed as an executive producer.
Luhrmann–of Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, and Australia fame–shot the film with a $127 million budget and will also release the 1920’s Jazz Era piece in 3D adding to the bright, affluent art direction the director made his bones with. But does Luhrmann’s movie do justice to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s esteemed novel, often considered the greatest in American literature? Let’s see what the professionals have to say.
Check out the Third ‘Great Gatsby’ Trailer:
Peter Howell, Toronto Star– “The story has ample drama to chew upon, and Fitzgerald did so in remarkably few pages — The Great Gatsby is more novella than novel. Yet it’s here where Luhrmann suddenly loses his nerve…Luhrmann almost gets away with the conjurer’s trick that is his TheGreat Gatsby, because the film looks so damned good, even though the 3D adds nothing of substance.”
A.O. Scott, New York Times –“The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s big and noisy new version of “The Great Gatsby” — and despite what you may have heard, it is an eminently enjoyable movie — is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you…Through this fog of glib allusion and secondhand thinking, the wistful glimmer of Fitzgerald’s prose shines like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock.”
Claudia Puid, USA Today– “Frenzied and overwrought, Baz Luhrmann’sThe Great Gatsbyis a glitz-filled folly.The director has fashioned a gaudy long-form music video — all kaleidoscopic spectacle and little substance — rather than a radiant new take on an American literary classic.”
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times– “Those who love the book (I’m among them) will spot moments of missed opportunity, but will also hear plenty of Fitzgerald’s words in the screenplay, and may well leave the movie feeling that something approaching justice has been done. Where this “Gatsby” fails, it at least does so with imaginative and verve; where it succeeds, it finds poetry.”
Christy Lemire, Associated Press– “His ‘’Great Gatsby’’ is all about the glitter but it has no soul — and the fact that he’s directed it in 3-D only magnifies the feeling of artificiality.Luhrmann’s adaptation, which he co-wrote with Craig Pearce, lacks the sense of melancholy and longing that emanated from the novel’s pages, even though the script invokes Fitzgerald’s prose early and often.”
