The Great Gatsby, Lurhmann-Style
Australian director Baz Luhrman certainly has a knack for infusing his period films with an aesthetic sensibility that is licentious, fantastical, frenetic, and gloriously historically incorrect. Like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! before it, the trailer for Luhrman’s cinematic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ur-Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby, is a hyper-saturated, lavish depiction of Jazz Age excess.
New York City looks both grittily old-timey and futuristic (all that neon), and it’s nice to get a taste of what Kanye and Jay-Z’s “No Church in the Wild” would lend to Prohibition-era soirées. Leonardo DiCaprio seems to take on Gatsby quite nicely (it’s easy to see him grappling with years of longing and ennui with that furrowed brow), and paired with Tobey Maguire as narrator Nick Caraway, Carey Mulligan as golden girl Daisy Buchanan, and Elizabeth Debicki as bad-girl Jordan Baker, Fitzgerald’s iconic characters are fleshed out into the 21st century.
Gatsby will be released December 25 in 3-D. Will Gatsby’s prized silk shirts flutter beautifully into the audience? We’re betting on popping champagne corks, confetti, wisps of flappers’ feathers, and that curious green light across the bay.
