The Great Gatsby: a Review of Reviews

There's a thousand and one opinions on Baz Luhrman's new film; here's a catalogue of a few and mine at the end.

Imdb: 7.5/10
Rotton Tomatoes: 49%
Metacritic: 55%

Joshua Rothman at the New Yorker states it like this:

Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian like this:

As for [Luhrman's] Gatsby, it is bombastic and excessive, like a 144-minute trailer for itself, at once pedantic and yet unreflective, as if Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce had created the film on the basis of a brief, bullet-pointed executive summary of the book prepared by a corporate assistant. 

A. O. Scott at the New York Times like this:

The result is less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence.

Stephen Marche at Esquire like this:

Here's the thing: Luhrmann's movie, and the vast array of marketting that surrounds it, is phony. But so is Gatsby. Gatsby is tasteless and vulgar and spends too much money. Gatsby is the original icon of hype. Which is why his story remains so relevant. The movie could easily have been set in Silicon Valley today. The illusions that Gatsby and Luhrmann create are lies and ultimately cheap and corrupt, but their spell is nonetheless powerful. The critics are unintentionally paying Luhrmann a compliment, I think; his version is not so much a film about Gatsby as the film Gatsby would make about himself. It's the most Gatsbyesque Gatsby possible. What better standard is there for adaptation?

David Denby at the New Yorker like this:

Luhrmann's vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he's less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

And so it goes on. The great agreement is the absolute presence of light and noise and dancing that makes much of Gatsby a raging party scene. But, personally, I liked that. Amidst the noise and chaos and excess, even if Luhrman literally painted the films points on the screen, I liked it. Its the perfect movie of excess made by a man know for excess about a man so excessively excessive in trying to win back the one thing he can't have. The point is that it doesn't work. Excess and money can't reclaim the past, or form love, or give us our green light. The excess is empty, and when people say this movie is shallow, I think its supposed to be. Its supposed to be the shallowest of all. And that's why I love it.