Caught a few minutes of the Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby this afternoon. Happened to switch on the goggle box and there it was on one of the movie channels. I can't say I'm familiar with all of Luhrmann's work but what I do know I like - especially Strictly Ballroom and his Romeo + Juliet (which I thought was brilliant.) I suppose in some ways I've been avoiding his Gatsby. I'm teaching the novel and generally I avoid watching versions of stuff I'm in the middle of teaching as it seems like an odd kind of overkill.
Anyway, I watched a fair chunk of the film, from Gatsby driving Nick into New York to Daisy crying over the shirts and I must say I thought it was superlatively good. In fact, something quite strange happened to me. I found the Gatsby-Daisy romance deeply touching, in a way that reading the novel has never quite done for me. The director pulls off the same trick he performed with his Shakespeare adaptation: by not bothering to be faithful to the original he somehow conjures the spirit of the original.
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I remember it getting trashed a lot by critics, who generally said the same thing (along the lines of how the departures from the novel in terms of plot and style were jarring), but I liked it too. One of the thoughts I had after it was about the fit between medium and story, that whereas the novel was very much Nick Caraway's novel, to me, the film was very much Gatsby's film, and that Luhrman was quite a genius for showing that.
Excellent thought, indeed. It helps also that DiCaprio's performance was of the bravura variety. I can't think of any other mainstream 'star' who would have been prepared to take the kind of chances Luhrmann rightly demanded of him and been able to make the character hold together.
And I'm talking about just the segment of the film I viewed.
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