Baz Luhrmann is a director that loves the
spectacle of cinema. From the visual, to
the technical, to the audio – it is clear that Baz is a card-carrying cinephile
that caught the bug early in his life.
His early postmodern classics Romeo & Juliet
and Moulin Rouge were
blockbuster events in the cinema calendar and are much loved, yet divisive
films. I have to admit that I am a fan,
even of his pretentious perfume
adverts. He also has a healthy 4-5
year gap between his film releases, which to me signifies a craftsman at
work. The news that he was directing the
Fitzgerald classic was instantly exciting to me…
The narrative of the novel has been much
discussed as a classic example of an unreliable narrator due to the voice being
that of a secondary character and not Gatsby himself. The film keeps this device and introduces us
to Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a New York bond trader who has recently moved
to the nouveau riche area of Long Island.
He lives next door to the extravagant, yet reclusive J. Gatsby; a man
that throws lavish parties but is rarely seen.
Nick gets invited to one of the parties, alongside his flamboyant cousin
Daisy Buchanan who is married to the hyper-rich capitalist Tom. Gatsby takes a liking to Nick and soon
persuades him to reintroduce him to Daisy, thus beginning an affair that leads
to a confrontation with each of the characters and the unwrapping of Gatsby’s
enigmatic past (for more detail, read here).
