The Great Gatsby Review

Baz Luhrmann's answer to a book about the distance between a dream and the thing itself is to build the dream at enormous expense and shoot it from a helicopter. Catherine Martin's production and costume design won Oscars and earned them: the Buchanan house with its curtains breathing in the sea wind, the shirts falling in a rain of pink and lavender, the yellow car as an object of pure want. The anachronistic score is harder to defend than its admirers claim. It lands in the party scenes and works against everything after them, because a story about a man who cannot hear the difference between 1922 and his own memory of it should not keep reminding you which decade the audience is sitting in.

DiCaprio is very good at Gatsby's manners, the rehearsed smile and the old sport used as punctuation, and the Plaza Hotel confrontation is the best thing here, with Joel Edgerton's Tom finally saying out loud what the room already knows. Carey Mulligan gets far less than she can do. The sanatorium frame, which turns Nick into a patient writing the novel as therapy, is an invention nothing in the story asked for.