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Critics reviews

THE GREAT GATSBY

Baz Luhrmann United States, 2013
That's the wondrous, moving twist at the heart of The Great Gatsby: that Gatsby – this mystery man with the ice-cream suit and beguiling smile, this glamorous figure, this rich power-broker who makes a traffic cop go away just by flashing his business card – is driven by nothing more (or less) than the love of a woman... This, in my opinion, is Luhrmann's best film yet (though I wasn't wild about the others), and the only one that made me tear up occasionally.
July 8, 2013
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One of this Gatsby's delights is the way it finds cinematic gestures befitting the book's mythologised Greater New York geography... Resurrected through CG, nothing in this lost city is remotely plausible – but the weightlessness of pixel-based art is a boon here, for Fitzgerald's idea of the period as a sort of mass-hallucination fits the way the actors swim through ethereal environments...
May 17, 2013
The Great Gatsby" is anything but great movie, but it may still have been the greatest opening attraction Cannes ever had, if only for the sake of serving as the festival's perfect mirror image. The story of excessive dreaming (as well as of dreamy excess) seems to be arriving in a magical aura all its own: the money is up there on the screen, along with partying, boozing and general overreaching (by characters and the filmmaker alike).
May 16, 2013
Why do we suddenly get thuds of Jay-Z on the soundtrack as the camera zooms (again) into the rooftops of Manhattan? Why do we have Lana Del Ray playing as a party winds down? There's no reason whatsoever for it. It's just forced eccentricity, adding nothing to what the story is about.
May 15, 2013
[It's] not that [Luhrmann's] missed the point of Fitzgerald's novel (though he has) or that his movie is a lousy adaptation of the book (though it is), but that Gatsby becomes nothing more than an occasion for the director to revisit familiar Luhrmann territory without expanding his ambitions thematically or aesthetically... The film never settles into the right register, a place of appropriate remove pitched somewhere between its schizophrenic extremes of parodic irony and adolescent sincerity.
May 14, 2013
What Luhrmann makes intoxicating is a sense of place – the houses, the rooms, the city, the roads – and the sense that all this is unfolding in a bubble like some mad fable. Where he falters is in persuading us that these are real, breathing folk whose experiences and destinies can move us.
May 14, 2013
If Gatsby's visuals are frieze-dried, the music dosesn't really resonate either. The use of post-Black Album Jay-Z tracks doesn't give the film edge so much as dull Jay's sharpness by association. Moulin Rouge! occasionally hit pay dirt in its aural juxtapositions (a can-can melody bleeding into Nirvana), but nothing here is remotely inspired.
May 10, 2013
The problem with Luhrmann's film is that it's under the top. For all of its lurching and gyrating party scenes, for all the inflated pomp of the Gatsby palace and the Buchanan mansion, for all the colorful clothing and elaborate personal styling, Luhrmann takes none of it seriously, and makes none of it look remotely alluring, enticing, fun.
May 10, 2013
Rather than trash Fitzgerald, Luhrmann is bizarrely reverent — treating "Gatsby" as though it were the Epic of Gilgamesh. Indeed, he bludgeons Fitzgerald's hardly subtle symbols (the green light on Daisy's dock, the giant eyes of central Queens) so relentlessly he might be starting a new religion.
May 9, 2013
Luhrmann's version is faithful to the narrative — not hard when you have 2 ½ hours to tackle a slender work — but without understanding its complexities. Riotous, time warpy parties and all, Baz plays it straight, or as straight as one can the actors always look like they're standing in front of green screen.
May 9, 2013
It's surprisingly faithful — to a fault. You could even call it an act of illustration: a cinematic Cliff's Notes, with all the vulgar underlining and explanatory spotlighting that suggests. (If you thought the all-seeing symbolic eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg were heavy-handed before, wait till you get a load of them here.) No, you won't be outraged by this Gatsby. But you might not be moved much, either.
May 9, 2013
Like Romeo + Juliet(1996), Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby emerges as a half-reverent, half-travestying adaptation that's campy but not a betrayal, offering a lively take on a familiar work while sacrificing such niceties as structure, character, and nuance.
May 9, 2013