GATSBY -SPLASH, TRASHY, OPERA

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

We saw the movie The Great Gatsby yesterday afternoon. It was in 3-D thus we wore glasses over our glasses. It has loud, boisterous parties in several scenes that seem to last forever. They are garish, noisy and gaudy. David Denby of The New Yorker said of the writer-director, Luhrman is “less a film maker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning lack of taste.” In the party scenes the director “confuses turmoil with style.”

However, the story stays fairly close to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story line in the novel about Gatsby.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Gatsby in a thoughtful and convincing way. He is vulnerable chasing a dream that makes him, at heart, weak. He is in love with a vision of the past, a woman that he can never have. In a larger sense it is the American dream of progress and glory, which no one can achieve but only strive for. The acting is very good and believable.

It is a movie very worth seeing. The costumes and sets are the 1920’s. The movie is entertaining and moving. The quiet moody music is enchanting. The party music is so loud and words unbearable, it must be popular.

The moral vision is that we must keep going onward and upward no matter what. The means of illegal drugs and alcohol justify the ends of riches, glamour and even love. The evil nature of the human condition is touched on by hints of poverty, degradation of women and carelessness of human life by reckless driving. But Fitzgerald and the film writers really don’t believe in sin or evil as part of human nature. They have hope that the good will prevail. I think that life is lived best when we acknowledge the depths of our evil and the fullness of our joy and live in a balance between the two.

Gatsby is a “splashy, trashy, opera” that shows an empty seeking of pleasure and love amidst an entertaining, sometimes funny, romp in the 1920s.