I would like to discuss Baz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Gatsby while it's still fresh.
My disclaimer for this whole thing is that I'm not quite sure I get The Great Gatsby. I need to read it again though, so I'm not going to say anything about the writing itself.
I'm going to start with my favorite thing, and that was the music. The music was incredible in that it represented quite well the time period the movie was made in as well as the time period the movie was made about. I was stunned by how chaos was portrayed so accurately through mixing the traditional music of the time and some of the rougher things about our music now.
I feel like I have no platform from which to judge Leonardo Dicaprio's performance because Gatsby himself, at least as far as I believe, is a different person inside of each head he is imagined in, so it was hard to see Dicaprio as even playing a character at all. It's confusing and hard to explain, but I believe that Gatsby himself, until he starts displaying his madness and losing his temper in the latter part of the movie, is so perfect and untouchable that he's boring. What makes Gatsby's character exciting is what other characters believe about him, so I was rather unimpressed for the first half of the movie. However, Dicaprio did display his incredible ability to act when he loses his temper with Tom Buchanan. So there's that.
The one thing that really bothered me about the movie though was the premise that Nick Caraway was writing The Great Gatsby as he told us the story. I can't remember whether or not that's a plot point in the end of the book, and it would have been fine in the movie, except that there was so much narration that I was disappointed that the audience was so often being told F. Scott Fitzgerald's beautiful language instead of being shown it. I see no point in having movies if a good portion of that is just a book on tape. Some scenes were absolutely stunning, but there were some things that were narrated that I would have preferred to have seen, not heard.
Overall I don't think I was as impressed as everyone I was with, but that really might just be my lack of understanding the story's importance as a whole. I see the irony in Daisy being a murderer and Tom being a violent alcoholic racist and them being the two who walk away from the story unscathed. I see the tragedy in Gatsby being in love with his memory of Daisy, and Daisy being in love with Gatsby's extravagance. I see the chaos in people living these shallow lives and not contributing positively to much, or anything at all. I know that there is beauty in F. Scott Fitzgerald's diction and metaphors and description, but I find it so hard to see the beauty of the tragedy of the story.
