[3.8/10] There is a scene, fairly early on in *The Great Gatsby*, director Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, that tells you everything you need to know about the film. The film’s bystander protagonist is reflecting on his time with the title character, describing Gatsby standing at the end of his dock, looking at what lay on the other side of the bay, as though he were reaching out for something there. And god help us, the film goes on to depict this, with not only the novel’s trademark green light piercing through some obviously CGI’d scenery, but with Gatsby himself literally reaching, hand outstretched, toward it. No, this isn’t a spiritual reach, an internal feeling put to words; it’s just Nick Carraway describing this weird thing he saw one time.

Such is the way of this ham-fisted, overly-literal, big, loud, and dumb adaptation of such a seminal work of fiction. There is no point too subtle that it can’t be screamed in the audience’s faces. There is no story beat too nuanced that it can’t be explicated to death in voice-over. And there is no theme, no whit of Fitzgerald’s dialogue, so ineffable or metaphorical that I cannot be made into some painfully obvious visual representation that shows all the imagination and depth of a children’s book trying to illustrate that “A is for Apple.”

Luhrmann's version of *The Great Gatsby* is, if not an insult, than at least a severe dumbing down of its source material, which is flattened and painted over in antiseptic computer-generated splendor to create an overly constructed, empty shell of a popcorn flick masquerading as art. Contrary to from whence it came, there is no soul or truth in this version of *Gatsby* only the vacuous echoes of a CliffsNotes understanding off this story and its ideas rendered through a series of music videos.

What good can be said about this mid-2010s monstrosity is that it captures the sense of exhausting excess baked into the story in a modern fashion. The movie’s opening third or so is a spastic sprint through lurid image after lurid image, with Jay-Z and other modern artists piped in liberally, and no chance for the audience to catch its breath in the midst of this splendiferous assault.

This presentation is done, like the rest of the film, with plenty of obvious signposting and one-dimensional introductions and “don’t do this cool thing” indulgence (of the same stripe that would impact star Leonardo DiCaprio’s spiritual cousin *The Wolf of Wall Street*. It is anything but faithful to the times or to its source material on this account. But it is, perhaps, faithful to the spirit of them, using its larger than life bent to convey the conspicuous and enervating excess of Gatsby’s shindigs and the general consequence-free extravagance that ensconces the story’s central characters.

It’s hard to call all this great exactly, but it gets at the tone of this high living in terms, in terms that a modern audience can understand.

Unfortunately, it appears that’s the only setting Luhrmann has in the film. The only instances when the film feels alive are when it’s trying to overwhelm you with spectacle and style. At some point, Luhrmann has to attempt to draw the picture back into something approaching real human feeling, and ends up feeling as shallow as Jay Gatsby’s ominously-referred-to pool.

The movie reduces Fitzgerald’s tale of obsession, class, and the floundering American dream to a soapy melodrama. The ideas of status, of different social strata and the limitations therein, are suffused to the background of a movie more interested in who’s schtupping whom behind who’s back and the high drama when it all blows up.

Sure, there’s potency in the other worldly imagery Lurman uses, of impossibly verdant West Egg, grimey New York City, and the coal-black no man’s’ land in between to signify some of the book’s takes on classism, and even Luhrmann can’t fully sidestep the bitter irony of which groups, which people, are forced to bear the consequences of those excesses and who has the freedom to leave them behind. But his *Great Gatsby* is far less interested in those things than it is in dazzling you and blaring its person-to-person snarls in your face as loudly as possible.

That translates to the acting in the film. In keeping with the visual style, nothing in the performances is natural. Tobey Maguire in particular is as affected and unbelievable as an actual human being having experiences that he comes off like an android sent to the 1920s to study human behavior and recite classic literature like it’s his final project in high school theater. In fairness, this appears largely to be a choice in the film throughout, with everyone going for outsized deliveries and brash, boisterous emotions and indications from stem to stern.

There is but one brief stretch of the film, where the film’s would-be romantic partners are reunited, and the film loses itself in the genuinely affecting notions of lost love and time that can be never gotten back. It’s in these brief moments, most of them terse by the film’s babbling standards, that Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio shine through the rubble of this ill-conceived adaptation and manage to convey more than an ounce of the feeling and complicated ideas and emotions at play in tragic tones. But it’s a short time until *The Great Gatsby* is back to wagging its maximalist bent in your face and leaving every figure in the film seeming as though they’re just playacting.

Luhrmann does try to preserve the prose, relying on voice over to maintain some modicum of Fitzgerald’s verbal ethos in the picture if he can capture nothing else. But even there, the words are literally superimposed on the screen, replete with conspicuous and corny title drops, or mangled into stilted monologues that poor Maguire just cannot spit out within the confines of his tortured frame story.

*The Great Gatsby* is an utterly dead film trying to pretend that it’s full of life. For every point Luhrmann wants to make, his solution is to smash the viewer in the face with a sledgehammer, with each strike punctuated by a thumping pop interpretation of an earlier industrial, and the mallet covered in glitter and gold monogrammed confetti. It is less an adaptation of a Great American Novel than a self-important perfume commercial dripping with pretense and commoditized flair. Stay away. In Luhrmann's hands, the roar of the twenties, and all the hidden cries that Fitzgerald tried to isolate within that din, are reduced to a whimper.