Our Gatsby

Baz Lurhrmann's most recent incarnation of the Great Gastby is not good. In fact, in this world of subjectivity we've confused for fact, let's just go ahead and say it's terrible. All films are afforded the same advantage, extremely low expectations. I'm a grown up, and after all, isn't adulthood really just the perpetual lowering of expectations? 

Arriving at the movie house in Den Haag, all full up of Dutch magic--perfect society there in the Netherlands, damnedest thing--beers in hand, 3D glasses snug tight, I set my brain for turd. Maybe slightly better than turd, but an aim no higher than crapsterpiece. Word to the wise, if you go to the Pathé in the Netherlands, get two beers, the price break almost defies basic economic principals. Plus it's Grolsch so you get to pop the top of the second mid-movie. And Gatsby provides plenty of hilarious, overwrought moments to squeeze off that bad boy, the only real entertainment you'll glean from this grueling two and a half hour film.

What went wrong? It's like trying to perform a post-op on a man who fell on a bomb. Grab a shovel, grab a garbage bag, and do your best to unlearn the horrors wrought. The only meaningful criticism applicable: after the film, the next two days were spent wondering what I liked about the book in the first place.

I read the Great Gatsby at eighteen. It was one of the few assigned books devoured in high school (here's looking at you Watership Down). To add some context, I was terminally eighteen. Boastful, nihilistic, drug addled, and laying in wait for a world set to quiver in the wake of my perceived genius. I was a lot cooler then. Over the years a lot of the details of Gatsby have been forgotten, the only certainty: it was one of those few perfect novels. I recommended it, waxed poetic about the lyrical prose, and--even after the fall to earth--I'd try and chat up kiosk girls reading it at the mall where I was selling shoes to flex my intellect. 

To this moment, there is a deep seeded fear in looking up the specifics from the book. Yes, it's a film, and film adaptations are meant to take liberties, but there are some narrative devices, if true to the book, are trash. Examples of lowest common denominator storytelling requiring no imagination, certainly not what should be required of a, "great American novel." 

In the ensuing days I read a sterling piece of criticism in regard to Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby. Every generation gets the Gatsby film it deserves. It's important to refrain from speaking of any generation in broad strokes. If this critique was infallible, the underlying conceit would be this generation is bad. It's simply not true, but if this film served as a civ to catch the glaring impurities in this generation's collective psyche, it's a damning condemnation of the millennials. 

To quickly retrace the lineage of Gatsby, one has to begin with the book. A bellwether of the lost generation of writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's book is not the best book from this era of authors--not by a long shot--but it's the most famous and an appropriate, enduring symbol. This was a generation who had the first peek at the size of the world and then this world collapsed into itself in a grisly, destructive war. After the winners were parceled out from the losers, the American dream took shape. Luxury goods took the place of character, the world to end all wars had the correct victors, and life would be cocktails and jazz parties heretofore. At least to those who deserved it, the others in society left to be forgotten in slums and tenements, a fate deserved and probably of their own making. Fitzgerald--at least as memory serves--captured the sentiment with subtlety and grace. The book reads like a faded Art Deco print torn from the front of a gilded concert hall wrapped around the shoulders of a bloodied drunk in a disheveled tuxedo destitute in content, if flush with money.

There is a silent version from 1926 I have not seen. If you have it, I'll take that piece of junk off your hands on the cheap. Then there is a version from 1949 with an exceptional performance from Alan Ladd as Gatsby, maybe one of his best. The film has been overlooked, but the trend seems to be post-war Americans looking for their soul love to generate another iteration of Gatsby. Filmed in splendid black and white, it's hard to fully gauge the merits of the film. With the Hays Code casting a shadow over all Hollywood film production, the carnality of the story is toothless. This was a time when American's were perceived as the best at their very best, and the film misses some of the pungency of a failed, misguided generation. 

Next comes the 1970's version starring Robert Redford. With the false promise of civil rights and the love generation having deflated into an era of conspicuous consumption along side economic ruin, the film served as an outgrowth of what President Carter would call, "a crisis of confidence." The film tried to tap into the nightmare of Vietnam, high gas prices, low employment rates, and nauseating largess as best it could. The adaptation falls well short in many ways, but the movie is executed with an even hand and a hint of coolness. The film is almost a two-way mirror meant to stand between different generations as close to each other as they are far apart. Far from a perfect film, and at times painfully vacuous like the era from which it comes, it's a respectable film bridging two eras of corrupt decadence with keen, satirical wit.

In 2000 a made for TV version was produced with Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, and, really--for your sake--forget it ever came up.

Baz Lurhrmann's Gatsby is a two and a half hour long selfie. I despise the term, but it's indicative of the merits of the film. If I was an old man in owl eyed glasses and a dark colored suit, this would be my bold pronouncement, "an entire generation that knows how to take a picture of themselves." Said with dread and contempt--and one of the many lenses through which I view a more curmudgeonly part of myself--it does represent a peculiar state of affairs. Every moment captured in high definition and clicked off and then telegraphed to the world left to linger in the expanse of Internet ether. A photo taken, then filtered, then cropped is posted and liked in the most noncommittal way and quickly forgotten with the refresh of a feed. Everything is gilt. Nothing resembles the arc of a glorious and contemptible reality. Even sadness is served up in an oblique way, more in line with self aggrandizement than self improvement. The lens has grown too wide and is skewed with too many soft focus lenses. We're no longer Gatsby and Carraway. We've become a culture who venerates Tom and Daisy.

2013 Gatsby is like a fancy dinner. The servants are in full livery. The fine china and silver have been impeccably laid out. The multitude of drinking glasses are like a quiz in refined manners. When everyone gathers round the table--outfits as sterling as the setting--after a hearty round of cocktails, the help comes out with dinner. As they know their station, they make no eye contact and keep their gaze focused on the line of old money golden dome serving dishes scuttling from the kitchen. Wide platters with classical motifs etched around the edges, they are placed in front of the partygoers by the almost invisible hands of the staff. When the moment comes, each placement with a butler perched at the ready, the dome is pulled off, a billow of steam uncurls toward the vaulted ceiling, and the plate is empty. Everyone cheers and digs in to the fantasy scooping heaping piles of nothingness into their unhinged jaws and vacant stomachs. Someone takes a photo of the invisible feast with their phone. It receives a combined 72 'likes' from various social media outlets.

The Great Gatsby is not meant for full color 3D splendor. This is not a story for saturated hues and heavy handed slow motion climaxes. The focus of this tale is not the garish facade, but the withered strand of human decency at the core. Where we would hope we were some artful and elegant notion of boats beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly against the past, we've reduced ourselves to the once great man, now a corpse, with one uninterested acquaintance standing over us with a simple, demure comment to add:

"The poor son-of-a-bitch."