There is an increasing level of madness to Luhrmann’s films. He has a certain taste for depicting chaos on screen, but somehow finding beauty in it. He was able to draw some type of beauty out of the violence scenes in Romeo + Juliet, and the burlesque scenes of Moulin Rouge, despite the fact that there is so much happening that we often don’t know where to look. It would seem there’s a method to all this, however, as I stated earlier, and it comes to light in the moments when he slows things down to focus attention on one thing at a time. The variation over the course of a film shows that he seems to know what he’s doing.
His style is big and loud in a way uncommon to your standard Hollywood blockbuster. It’s the blockbuster chaos aesthetic applied to the colorful musical in the case of Moulin Rouge, or from the looks of it, to the decadent period style in Gatsby. I’d say it’s like Michael Bay doing Broadway but that may be a little crass. The most striking feature of his style is that mixed in with the insanity are little elegant touches sprinkles every so often. I think of the John Leguizamo character in Moulin Rouge as an example of this. It may seem I’m drawing too much from Moulin Rouge, but especially when it comes to the style seemingly employed in Gatsby, it seems to be the most definitive example of what Luhrmann has sought out to achieve in his earlier, smaller pictures. So there.
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