On Seeing the movie The Great Gatsby

On Sunday Rachelle and I went to see the movie The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, who is celebrated for the brio and invention he typically brings to films, I was keen on seeing the movie in spite of the middling to poor reviews that were clouding it. 

Well, it turned out to be one of those movies in which you are quickly conscious of the fact that it’s long, by which I mean you’re swiftly bored. It was impossible to penetrate through the surface of the images splashing in front of us, and instead of being immersed in the complexities of a grand narrative, we felt kind of like we were flipping through the pages of a pretty magazine while waiting for something better or more important to take place.

This might have been intentional, as it’s a relatively accurate thematic representation of the core of the source material, but it made for a pretty lousy movie. I mean, if we’d been handed a catalogue and told to go sit in the dark with earphones on– where passages of the novel were read to us–we probably would have had a deeper, more connective and personal experience.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, I think, one being that is was shot in 3D, and I’m not a big fan of this developing novelty. To me it’s a special effect that’s at it’s most useful when animating the unreal or exaggerating cataclysmic disasters.  Instead of rendering actors more real and life-like,  it reduces and flattens them into one dimension, draining all life and subtext from them.  They’re about as emotionally penetrable as robots or mannequins, and as they stand in front of you there’s absolutely nothing compelling in them.

I had no interest or attraction to anybody in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even want to go to any of the lavish parties that were being thrown. Everything was just a summoned mirage to me, perhaps like the one that drove Gatsby toward his green light, and maybe that’s the difference between experiencing a work of art as a boy, and then returning to it later, in middle age,  discovering that the fields you played in as a child were not tall stretches of eternity, but just small, scrubby accidents of geography.