In the film, Joel Edgerton delivers a fantastic performance as the cold, adulterous Tom Buchanan, but the other main characters struggle to provide their respective actors with something thematic to say. Elizabeth Debicki has the looks of a gorgeous cynic, but writers Luhrmann and Pierce reduce Jordan Baker to a carrier of exposition. Carey Mulligan is emotional enough to act like a shallow fool, but plays the character with insecurity rather than the superficiality that the book affirms. Tobey Maguire brings the naivety of a Midwesterner, but the screenwriting morphs his character from a passive observer to an admiring child. Finally, Leonardo DiCaprio might have “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,” but DiCaprio’s natural ambience is irrelevant if it isn’t juxtaposed against the fatigue that Gatsby experiences in the novel. Without a doubt, the film has some messy writing. The Great Gatsby tries to compensate by using flashy visuals and a booming Jay-Z soundtrack, but the critics still call foul.
Yet, I still find it difficult to hold Baz Luhrmann responsible for his mistakes because The Great Gatsby alludes to an audience that doesn’t care. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a tragedy as a cautionary tale to the common American, just to be ignored by the bourgeois audience that he was targeting. But why? Surely, the middle class should be the most concerned with how the rich spend their money. Why else would we dedicate so much time to the “We are the 99%” movement? Why else would we insist that normal people matter? Yet The Great Gatsby, as a novel, was greeted with a quiet lethargy upon release, receiving respect by scholars and pundits only when the war was over and when Fitzgerald had passed away.
At its best, Nick Carraway is a poor representation of the bourgeois. At its worst, the character is the sole reason why The Great Gatsby is often overlooked and misunderstood. The poor may act out of desperation and the rich may act out of boredom, but the middle-class act out of comfort. Nick, on the other hand, repeatedly acts out of curiosity. Nick does not represent the average, middle-class American because he is far too absorbed in Gatsby to possess any form of self-interest. Furthermore, Nick states that he is restraining his bias towards Gatsby, but it is clear that he holds Gatsby in an unblemished light. Rather than allowing the bourgeois to connect to our narrator, Fitzgerald desperately tries to make his readers empathize with Gatsby. This limits the audience to a group of scholars, educators, and teachers: thinkers with both subjective views and objective insight. Or simply put, people that are able to think “within and without.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” To say the least, nostalgia is a curse. The film struggles to emphasize Gatsby’s futile struggle in reliving his romance with Daisy, but literature pundits fail to overcome their nostalgia for the book as they watch the film adaptation. Luhrmann avoids making Nick relatable, trying to use Gatsby as a vehicle for the audience instead. Though it severely misses the point of the novel, the movie ultimately has a tangible audience: upper middle-class adolescents who grew up watching DiCaprio (Catch Me If You Can, Inception) and Maguire (Spider-Man). If you’re really bent on watching a loyal adaption of The Great Gatsby, you’re just as delusional as Gatsby.
