“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy” says Jordan Baker, one of the many socialites who flock to the extraordinary parties of the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. But nobody at the party knows who Gatsby is. They know where he lives (a palace on the shores of a lake on the outskirts of New York) and they know how he lives (excessively), but no more. And, as long as the drinks keep flowing, they don’t really care to know him either.
And neither does Baz Luhrmann, it seems, whose adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rightly heralded novel is more concerned with the life Gatsby leads than the mysterious character at the heart of it all. The bombastic approach to style he employs glosses over the novel’s narrative richness and all but kills the film as a faithful adaptation, but it does bring the money soaked lifestyle of the upper class – so beautifully described by Fitzgerald – to life in an appropriately excessive way.
The party sequences, for example, set to the music of Jay-Z and Kanye West – a choice which, against better judgment, works incredibly well – and exquisitely shot by cinematographer Simon Duggan’s elaborately sweeping camera captures a world buoyed by financial security and obsessed with status, class and money in a way other adaptations of Gatsby simply don’t, and that’s what makes Luhrmann’s film such a fun, modern and exciting proposition: the comic wildness of it all is rendered perfectly on screen without having to resort to tired and antiquated notions of the past.
Yes, The Great Gatsby may be a large party with no intimacy, forgetting substance in its quest for style and a breathless momentum that inevitably dies out two thirds in, but as a stylistic exercise it’s in a league of its own. If more literary adaptations were as brave as this the boring idea of textual faithfulness will disappear for good, and that can only benefit cinema in the long run.
