The Great Gatsby

The problem with The Great Gatsby movies (count them: four since 1926) is that Fitzgerald's prose is too damn good, too lusciously over-the-top, not to be read. This most recent filmization of what I would consider an almost certainly unfilmable novel is director Baz Luhrman's wet dream: he gets to show off his affection for the gaudy, garish, decadent opulence of the New York of the Jazz Age, and then play his usual anachronistic games by substituting rap music as the background melody to the wild orgies that gave the Roaring 20s their bite.

The casting isn't half bad: At thirty-eight, Leonardo DiCaprio finally looks thirty, and he's good as Jay Gatsby: he's got that glint in his eye which betrays the secrets haunting his character's labyrinthine mind, and that charming grin that locks the viewer into place as a willing participant, going along for the carnival ride concocted by Jay Gatsby, a sort of social magician if you will. He's the ultimate American: the man with enough charm and brains to re-invent himself from the poor farm-boy to the rich, enigmatic darling of the New York social scene. All the time I kept thinking that this is what might have happened to Pip, the orphan from Great Expectations, if morality hadn't gotten in the way at the end. No, DiCaprio finally seems well-cast here, as he was in Django Unchained, playing a part that was so much fun and so much out of the ordinary.

Now that DiCaprio has played so many iconic roles--Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.--I'm hoping he's gotten these Oscar-baiting movies out of his system. Perhaps DiCaprio isn't gunning solely for a golden statue, perhaps these are just the most challenging and interesting roles he's being offered, but up until Django I hadn't been very impressed with him or his movies of late. Everything about his performances seemed predictable and tired. He's not particularly different in Gatsby, but it may be that the role itself finally fits him to a tee, and the allure of Fitzgerald's tragic hero rubs off onto DiCaprio the way it did with his character in Titanic with all the fangirls shrieking over him. He's irresistibly handsome, but also hopelessly idealistic. But with the latter characteristic, the movie ignores something crucial in the novel: Gatsby seems aware--whether it bugs him or not--of Daisy's true nature. Gatsby tells Nick that her voice is "full of money," which suggests a deeper cynicism in him than the movie wants to display.

As the vapid spoiled rich girl Daisy Buchanan, Carey Mulligan is also quite convincing: she's petite enough and pale and unassuming enough to be credible as someone whose thoughtlessness is a worse crime than someone else's genocide. This is ultimately the horrible joke of The Great Gatsby: it's a story that applauds the men's pursuit and domination of the women, who turn out to be so shallow and self-interested that we no longer sympathize with them for being treated like objects. They are objects, and they've learned how to be happy within such conditions. (Now I understand what she meant when a friend once told me she disliked how sexist Fitzgerald's novel was.) Daisy says a woman can only survive if she's a fool, and it's apparent that this is an axiom she's taken to heart: but it's also a cop-out, and it's how she gets away with murder and keeps Gatsby at her beck and call.

And then there's Tobey Maguire playing Nick Carraway, Daisy's cousin and Gatsby's neighbor, the narrator of the story and the limpid bystander who gets to live vicariously through his friends. He's a blank, impressionable man, rendered impotent by the privilege of his upbringing. Gatsby, the iconic self-made man, stands next to him as a god, and Nick spends the entire novel (and film) giving alms to him.

But Maguire lacks something: he says his lines clumsily at times, and while his goofy gaucheness seems appropriate for the role of Nick, it also makes him seem more pathetic. He's the least interesting character of the bunch, which may be the very reason Fitzgerald made him a narrator: it ultimately gives him more authority, not less, which is some kind of perverse irony, I guess. But the sleepwalking performance doesn't do much for the film, and what's worse, Nick is our intercessor, dumping out and sorting through the exposition like an archivist. We don't have to do any of the work. It feels forced and obvious, and as much as Luhrman wants to bask in the visual splendor of his wanna-be masterpiece, The Great Gatsby makes the fatal mistake of relying too heavily on telling us information rather than showing it.

What is shown are the wild parties with naughtily-dressed dancers and champagne gushing and oozing out of bottles and confetti floating in the air and Chinese lanterns beaming down on the ground from the trees and strung-out Jazz Age loonies dancing until the dawn and passed-out guests being scooped up by the servants in the sobering morning light. This is all sort of impressive, but sort of cheap: much of the production seems to have been designed on the computer (and indeed, they have been pushing this as the latest 3-D experience, which is beyond irritating), so nothing seems real. I suppose one could argue that that's what Luhrman was going for--an unreal world--but it displaces us. We're left with the plot being fed to us via silver spoon. Granted, Luhrman manages to capture that mysterious pull of Fitzgerald's novel to a degree. He just doesn't succeed all the way. This latest incarnation is too full of eye candy to ever focus its grasp on anything more than a lot of sloppy ideas about love and hope. It never gets at the ache of materialism that Fitzgerald really got across in the book. There are glimmers of that, though, and I don't think it's as bad as some critics have said. It's just proof that The Great Gatsby doesn't ever translate totally to film.

With Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isla Fisher, and Jason Clarke. 143 min. ★★

Zero Dark Thirty

The long, long hunt for Osama bin Laden. If you saw The Hurt Locker, which is the previous collaborative effort from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, you'll begin to notice a common theme, besides all the obvious commonalities: personal obsession. In The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner got off on the thrill of debugging bombs. In Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a CIA officer, obsessively dedicated to tracking down and killing the man responsible for 9/11. There's an exchange between her and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini), where he asks her what else she's done in her career besides search for a ghost of a man. She replies, "nothing." She's driven by the conviction--with monomaniacal devotion and purpose--that bin Laden alone is worth the entirety of her ambitions and focus.

The slow-paced Zero Dark Thirty is a thriller for those of us who are exhausted by thrillers that can't cause enough destruction fast enough. The real world is a frightening place, with or without myriad explosions. In a movie like Zero Dark Thirty, those explosiony scenes are not fodder for thrills, but points of turbulence boiling over, punctuated by the time spent before and after them--not so much leading up to them and responding to them, as making sense of them, and turning the mirror on our own inabilities to truly make sense out of anything in the clash of two incredibly different cultures, both hostile toward each other.

As politically "now" as Zero Dark Thirty is, it doesn't have much of an axe to grind. I heard Bigelow say in an interview with NPR that she wanted the past to be portrayed as accurately as possible, not whitewashed. That said, her latest film doesn't seem to be gunning for anyone. It's not an expose of military practices, or a particular political party, or the country, or any belief system. Rather, it's an attempt to dramatize what has been arguably the most compelling--and drawn-out--historical moment of our time. Of course, viewing a movie like Zero is difficult. We're at both an advantage and a disadvantage when we're staring so close to these events, these very real events. From Here To Eternity, which dramatized the Pearl Harbor attack, was released 12 years after the fact. Zero Dark Thirty comes only a year-and-a-half since the discovery of bin Laden. One wonders how this movie will hold up, factually, as history reveals more information, commuting the present into the past, and shedding new light on the complex agendas waging war with each other.

This is a movie that compellingly gins up our emotions. We're rooting for the military, still stinging from a horrifying event. And yet one cannot help but wonder at the deep divides between the West and other parts of the world. Despite the "happy ending," there's not really a happy ending. And Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in pressing this idea into the mind. It's a hollow victory, if anything.

The performances are exceedingly good: Jessica Chastain carries the film impressively. She has good support from Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Taylor Kinney, Edgar Ramirez, and Mark Duplass. It's a subtle, frightening, riveting, maddening vision of contemporary American and global politics and conflict. ★★★½

Lawless

Whenever I see the caption, "based on a true story," I groan inwardly. Why must we be sold this BS over and over again? I don't care if Lawless is a documentary "as reliable as the world almanac" (to quote Bette Davis in All About Eve). That "based on a true story" line feels like exactly what it is: promotional gimmickry. It's insulting. Why must a movie be based on fact to be important? Doesn't setting a movie during the time of Prohibition qualify as interesting enough? But, I digress.

Lawless rehashes Prohibition with fetishistic brutality. It fails to achieve the things it wants to: the lionization of its main character, the showcasing of a riveting battle between good and evil, the depiction of the South in the 1930s. These are gimmicks designed to half-heartedly pin down a movie that appears to be made by and for people who get off on meaningless acts of violence. (Granted, the film's violent moments do give it a little kick, which it desperately needs at times, to keep it moving if nothing else.) At least when the mob is drilling holes into Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, you feel a sense of loss. And rooting for the bad guys to get their due isn't such a terrible thing, but in this film, it somehow feels pointless to try and distinguish the bad from the good. Despite the fact that everyone's a criminal in some way, the lines are pretty starkly drawn: the villains are utterly unlikable, the heroes are good enough to be heroes (and just as unlikable). Their main flaws are stubborness, stupidity, and excessive enthusiasm for getting even. These flaws help the movie lurch toward its conclusion, but they're hard to accept and often times maddening to watch.

Because these characters fail to engender much sympathy, you don't feel invested in their plight when Guy Pearce, who gives a mindless performance as a thuggish Chicago detective, arrives in rural Franklin County, Virginia. Pearce looks like a prissy comic book villain, sporting a slicked-back hairdo and a fancy suit and gloves. He doesn't seem to fit in this movie, nor does his emergence from the big city feel credible in the least. He's the epic villain of director John Hillcoat's dreams, and he's in this movie for sheer convenience: the script may as well read: "Charlie Rakes, who's pure evil, enters." Pearce's character wants to take control of all the local moonshiners so he can rule the town with an iron fist.

There's one holdout operation, though: the Bondurant brothers, headed by Forest Bondurant (Tom Hardy). Hardy's taciturn performance reminded me of faded black-and-white family pictures of long-dead relatives who made their livings on farms in Western Kentucky. Hardy's certainly got the tough-as-nails side of his performance down. He's a good actor, but his performance in Lawless doesn't exhibit nearly the range he's capable of. Forest is joined by his two brothers: perpetually drunk Howard (Jason Clarke) and cowardly Jack (Shia LaBeouf). Jack is the runt of the litter who wants to rise in his brothers' estimation. Thus, he's constantly trying to prove himself and generally unsuccessful in his attempts. Jack's stupid mistakes account for much of the plot's predictable progression toward what we expect will be a bloody showdown between the Bondurant boys and Guy Pearce. But if you go back far enough, you'll see plenty of movies about Prohibition, and most of them are at least more interesting than this one, which is only mildly entertaining at best and creepily violent at worst.

The film's overly deterministic, trigger-happy progression becomes more than irritating and tiresome: it makes you resent the writing (the script is by Nick Cave) and the directing. The story is too carefully constructed--it maximizes the shock value but still has the nerve, or maybe the foolishness, to try and tug at your heartstrings: Jack develops a little light romance with a preacher's daughter, and at the end, the film tries to wrap things up with a nice domestic ending. Hardy falls for Amanda Chastain, a Chicago dancer who's tired of the big city and is hired to tend the bar at his restaurant. Neither of the female leads is given much to do. (One more unpleasant reminder that women still have a rough time getting good parts in movies. They're always having to settle for this kind of banality, it seems.) If you can get a thrill out of the endless slayings with knives and other sharp instruments, and if you can buy all the syrupy stuff that's thrown in between to make the movie seem more layered, you'll surely find Lawless to be some great piece of entertainment, rather than what it is, which is a waste of time.

Directed by John Hillcoat. The supporting cast includes Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Dane DeHaan, and Lew Temple. 110 minutes.