For all its flaws, The Great Gatsby is a mind-bending experience. Luhrmann used music much more masterfully in Romeo + Juliet, which some may say is a more accomplished adaptation (there, he fully modernized a classic, setting it in present times - unlike Gatsby, which he keeps in the 1920s).Īnd yet, Gatsby is still genius, even if so much of what horrified in Fitzgerald's book - the rottenness of the lot of them - doesn't have as much resonance in these Facebook-heavy, reality-TV-driven times. And the music - what happened to the music? The soundtrack is wonderful, but we only hear slivers of most of it, and often not enough for the songs to enhance the movie's vision. Luhrmann can move too quickly from one overfull scene to the next, too, not giving the audience time to take it all in. Some scenes explode with so much visual stimulation that watching them feels rapacious and gluttonous - a perfect strategy for evoking the excesses of the Jazz Age, yes, but also distracting and hard to enjoy. The same criticisms can be brought to bear on The Great Gatsby. His cinematic canvasses have sometimes been dismissed for being overstuffed, his take on the classics - a mix of tradition and overwhelming modernism - muddled.
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