It’s tough to be sincere in a culture where cynicism often drowns out well-intentioned self-expression, and Luhrmann’s work could be seen as something of an antidote to this. Think of it as a sort of punk rock rejection of the notion that we must be in existential crisis at all times, realistic about our dismal prospects in life, honest about the fact that love is a manufactured concept meant to sell greeting cards, and in despair about the death of God.
To this, Baz Luhrmann holds up Ewan McGregor, the naïve writer who falls in love with the courtesan that is Nicole Kidman, grasping at the slim hope that they could one day be together. It’s completely foolish of him to think so, but he does it. Maybe he knows that it’s relatively hopeless. Maybe he’s a kind of existential hero, asserting himself in the face of a world without meaning, establishing his own meaning for himself, as one who believes in the power of love, like the Beatles used to sing about. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to recognize how ridiculous remaking The Great Gatsby as inspired by the music of Jay-Z is, but at the same time it should be a subject of admiration, that someone is able to take a grain of an idea like that and flesh it out into something visually compelling and potentially entertaining and even enlightening and inspirational, to essentially hear all the objections from the cynics and turn to face them and just shrug and say eh, what the hell.
