


This is FRESH AIR. One of the most eagerly awaited films of the year is Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby," the latest adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald jazz age novel about love and death and money. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the mysterious; lovelorn Jay Gatsby; and the cast also includes Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: While I was watching Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" back in 2001, I had the oddest experience. Someone's cellphone rang and instead of getting annoyed, I was relieved. The movie's bombardment was so relentless, so suffocating, that I thrilled to a signal from the outside world.

EDELSTEIN: Therefore, I admit to approaching Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" - which is in 3-D, no less - with dread. Here was one of my least favorite directors, taking on one of my favorite novels. Well, the movie is loud and obvious and heavy-handed, but not the desecration I feared. It's more like a cartoony, Broadway musical version of Gatsby in which no one, alas, sings. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's original can handle the vulgarity.


It's too bad Luhrmann has a framing device that's amazingly inane. The '20s are over; and the youngish narrator, apprentice bond trader Nick Carraway, is in rehab. He's writing a memoir overseen by an eager shrink, and as Fitzgerald's words emerge from his typewriter, they often drift across the screen and in 3-D, into our faces. Oy.

If you don't know the plot, Nick, played by Tobey Maguire, rents the dilapidated house next to the North Shore Long Island mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who throws outlandishly extravagant parties that he watches from a room above. It turns out, Gatsby yearns for a woman named Daisy - Carraway's cousin - whom he courted five years earlier, as a poor soldier. Now, she's married to the trust-fund, polo-playing philanderer Tom Buchanan, whose manse is directly across the water.


Leonardo DiCaprio embodies that longing, though. The performance is broad, and he's more tan and healthy than I imagine the character. But that works here. His Gatsby is still glowing with youthful dreams. He feigns an upper-class accent, in the sincere conviction he can rise in society. It's easy to believe he thinks that with his new wealth, he can vanquish time.

He finally meets Daisy, played by Carey Mulligan, in a touching scene in Nick's house. And for a while, it looks as if he'll win her back. But later, in a tense scene in the Plaza Hotel, he has to overcome the bull that is Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan.






EDGERTON: (as Tom Buchanan) Self-control? Oh, I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody, from Nowhere, make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea, you can count me out. See, nowadays, people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions.


EDGERTON: (as Tom Buchanan) You must be crazy.


EDELSTEIN: The Australian Edgerton is a fine, subtle actor, but his Tom has few grace notes. And most of the other actors are equally over the top; the exceptions being the Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan, as the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, and the Australian actress named Elizabeth Debicki, who's an archetypal New Yorker flapper cartoon brought to vivid life.

Debicki pretty much upstages the Daisy of Carey Mulligan, an excellent actress who doesn't pop out of the screen the way you'd hope from this most tantalizing of all American literature's objects of desire. But I suspect none of us would agree on the ideal Daisy.

You can find fault with every scene in "The Great Gatsby," but Fitzgerald does come through. Luhrmann throws money at the screen in a way that's positively Gatsby-like. He wallops you intentionally and unintentionally, with the theme of prodigal waste.


BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine. You can download podcasts of our show at, and follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair, and on Tumblr at




