The Great Gatsby Review

The Great Gatsby has been acclaimed has been described as one of the great American stories, and has already been adapted to screen so many times but the one director that could probably give the story a proud version is Baz Luhrmann. Good ol’ Baz has shown how he can create a pace driven extravaganza of a film like Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge. However, I felt that even though Luhrmann was born to make this film, I don’t think he gave the story much justice and just made it way too long just to include the grand parties and for some reason Jay Z. 

The Great Gatsby is based on the 1920s novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, where it follows the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his next door neighbour Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who serves as the narrator of the whole film, trying to find his first love Daisy, who happens to be Nick’s cousin. Most of the film follows Gatsby and Nick’s blossoming friendship which seems filled with hole with Gatsby’s very mysterious nature, where the film then turns its attention to how Gatsby and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) try to rekindle their past love under the nose of Daisy’s husband and Nick’s friend Tom (Joel Edgerton). 

Throughout the film, you can tell that you are watching a Baz Luhrmann film, with its excessive filmic style where things are flying all around the screen, you sometimes struggle to be able to pay attention to the main points of the film when someone is jumping from one side of a

building to another. Having said this, I did enjoy the film stylistically with its brilliant cinematography it just oozes colour, but another main point I enjoyed about the film is the acting and the cast. With the likes of Tobey Maguire’s performance of a recovering alcoholic Carraway just shows that maybe he isn’t just Spiderman anymore. Maguire brings a very comic side to the story compared to Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Gatsby more resolved, but I don’t think Maguire is ever going to be able to shake off the Spiderman tag even though that he can put in some great performances. Also, Carey Mulligan’s performance of Daisy just shows that she will be a big player in Hollywood soon, with an Academy Award nomination already under her belt for An Education and being in great films such as Drive just shows that she will go far. But the main focus of the acting and performance for the whole film must be on Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of Jay Gatsby. Even though the film may not have been as successful with the critics, there is no way that you could say that DiCaprio’s performance was not great. You may go as far as to say that is Leo actually acting or is this just what he’s like, an angry guy with a mysterious past.

But there is one scene I want to focus on just to show how Leo’s performance overshadows all of the other characters in the film. Leonardo Di Caprio’s performance in The Great Gatsby seems to switch between from him being shown as a confident rich man with an evident swagger in his walk to someone who is overcome with nervousness and rage. In the scene where Jay Gatsby (Di Caprio) firsts meets Daisy, the transition is shown when the regularly cool Gatsby is shown herding a group of men with flowers to bombards Nick Carraway’s (Tobey Maguire) ahead of his reunion with his early love Daisy. We see the usual suave and sophisticated Gatsby turn to what could be described as a nervous wreck by constantly checking the time and rearranging his suit, this shows how Di Caprio has played the character in a nervous way. Also the audience gets the sense that Di Caprio can actually pull off the idea of him playing a character who is also playing a character within the film, as he immerses himself into the character of Gatsby. The audience gets the idea that something isn’t actually fine with the character as a whole as it seems that he can slip into a nervous wreck in a heartbeat.  Di Caprio’s performance of Gatsby is heightened through the use of his voice and how he address’ other characters, with the use of the catchphrase ‘old sport’. Throughout the sequence we get the idea that he was shown to be nervous through the stumbling of his own words when he tries to speak to Daisy, compared to the beginning of the sequence speaking to Carraway. The facial expressions performed by Di Caprio could be said to be quite unconventional as we got the sense of his nervousness seeping through his facial expressions. I got the idea that his face shows more of the Gatsby character than his costume, his posture could be shown as a complete mismatch compared to his facial expressions. This performance choice gives the idea of how he is trying to stay calm by casually swooping his hair back, but this act is shattered through his face and how he stares straight, with more movement shows the chaos of the performance by Di Caprio but it shows how the character was portrayed throughout the film. The physical movement performed by Di Caprio in the sequence is probably the more expressive part of his acting in The Great Gatsby, the way he is showing the audience how his is unsure of himself and the idea that the character himself is a character also, and tries to rearrange himself to which stance and posture will suit better with the scenery shows Di Caprio’s acting abilities.   

Even though most films have to have at least good performances from their cast, I mean The Great Gatsby’s cast was really good and all of the characters were played really well, however, DiCaprio just ran the show for most of the film. However, I don’t think that the film should have just banked on Leo’s performance with the film not having a lot of substance but just crazy parties. So overall, I did enjoy the film and you can really tell that it is a Baz Luhrmann film but I felt that a lot of the film was filler until DiCaprio came on screen and the inclusion of random Jay Z songs in a film set in the 1920’s really baffled me and I think an adaption more set to the times may have been more successful.