movie review of great gatsby

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The Great Gatsby Reviews

Some will highly enjoy the glamorous favoritism towards the Gatsby character that Luhrmann leans. Others will miss the enigmatic mystery the character possessed all the way until his final moments on the page and his resonance afterwards.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 14, 2024

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby is passionate and perfectly cast...

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 20, 2024

Extravagant and “modern”, the classic book adaptation is flawed, but its production design still wows, and DiCaprio’s mysterious turns inject much needed emotion and “substance”... the film is not saved by Luhrmann – it is saved in spite of him.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 9, 2024

It is too painful even to imagine the havoc a director as MTV-flashy and hollow as BL wrought on poor Fitzgerald, the literary hero of my teenage years...

Full Review | Apr 1, 2024

The Great Gatsby lacks the charm and the nostalgia of musicals such as High Society, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain. Ehrlich claims Luhrmann is trying to reinvent the present, but it doesn’t feel like that way.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2023

Flappers and fops, speakeasies and saps get the Baz Luhrmann movie-musical mash-up treatment in this 2013 visually arresting take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's much-loved 1925 novel.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 26, 2023

Lurhmann’s over-the-top and certainly overwrought approach may be refreshingly unconventional to some, but it fails to achieve Nick’s crucial observer status as “within and without” by delighting far too much in the billowing decadence of the setting

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 6, 2022

Baz Luhrmann may be trying to capture the vivacity of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel through his visual style, but I think the story itself retains plenty of that for my taste.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

[Luhrmann] pushes style to the brink and even crosses the line of excess at times, but it's all in service of selling the film's exploration of the gilded false happiness that the achieved American Dream brings.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 11, 2022

This divisive adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel is at the very least delicious to look at, with the infamous parties that drive the novel depicted in all their extravagance and glory by Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann.

Full Review | Nov 11, 2021

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is a failure. It's a poor adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's powerful text and it's tragic that such a great novel has been bastardised, becoming a flashy, CGI blockbuster.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 17, 2021

The Australian director brings to the material a largely crude and cartoonish approach. He appears to suffer from an almost fatal literal-mindedness.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2021

The film does nothing to beat against the current. There's no lesson that all this 1920s extravagance is problematic. The message is to party like a rock star and dress like a robber baron - just don't waste all your money chasing a woman who waffles.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2021

The lead trio of DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire keep proceedings grounded by applying a sincere emotional gravity to their performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2020

The film, which is still vastly superior to the 1974 Robert Redford version, is emotionally adrift yet visually arresting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 9, 2020

When [Luhrmann] steps back from the world-building and focuses on the intimate love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy, and Buchanan, that's where everything comes to a screeching halt.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 27, 2020

When it comes to translating a classic novel, more could have been done here. A lot less could have been done, at the same time.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

For all the gimmicks, flamboyant celebrations, and intrusive modern flourishes, the film is loud and boisterous, but ultimately empty. Gazing at the spectacle, you can't help but think it will eventually all add up to something, but it never does.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 9, 2020

Director Baz Luhrmann makes 'The Great Gatsby' the ultimate adaptation of Fitzgerald's work. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 25, 2020

[It] allows a modern audience to see Leo's stylized Gatsby as more than a petulant nouveau riche interloper, to grasp that Gatsby is at heart a story of class warfare, disguised as a doomed love affair.

Full Review | Jun 19, 2020

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The great gatsby: film review.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan star in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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While secondary characters wore the majority of Prada’s designs, Daisy’s party dress (pictured being worn by Carey Mulligan ) was the only one chosen for the primary characters.

The center holds amidst all the razzle-dazzle and razzmatazz of Baz Luhrmann ‘s endlessly extravagant screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘s imperishable The Great Gatsby .

As is inevitable with the Australian showman, who’s never met a scene he didn’t think could be improved by more music, costumes, extras and camera tricks, this enormous production begins by being over-the-top and moves on from there. But, given the immoderate lifestyle of the title character, this approach is not exactly inappropriate, even if it is at sharp odds with the refined nature of the author’s prose. Although the dramatic challenges posed by the character of narrator Nick Carraway remain problematic, the cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed.

Set to open the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, five days after its U.S. theatrical bow, the Warner Bros. release stands to receive the full range of critical responses and is backed by an unstinting promotional push to spark big openings, which are far from assured. Its ultimate box office fate, though, will be determined by whether or not the film catches on with younger audiences; it’ll be a matter of the zeitgeist.

PHOTOS: ‘Great Gatsby’ Premiere: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z and Carey Mulligan Hit the Red Carpet

At the very least, Luhrmann must be given credit for delivering a real interpretation of the famous 1925 novel, something not seriously attempted by the previous two big screen adaptations (there was a now-lost 1926 silent version). Paramount’s long-elusive 1949 release, directed by Elliott Nugent , suffered from threadbare production values and uneven performances but Alan Ladd was a terrific Gatsby. The same studio’s second attempt, in 1974, felt suffocating and stillborn; it had the wrong director in Jack Clayton, and Robert Redford was opaque in the title role. A 2000 television adaptation did not make a significant impression.

For many, the thought of Luhrmann tarting up such a revered classic with 3-D, anachronistic Jay Z and Beyonce music, techno-spiced party scenes and Australian locations was sacrilegious, if not criminal. Perhaps even fans of what the director did with William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! might have wondered if he was the right guy to take on the work most often proposed as The Great American Novel.

But no matter how frenzied and elaborate and sometimes distracting his technique may be, Luhrmann’s personal connection and commitment to the material remains palpable, which makes for a film that, most of the time, feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source.

PHOTOS: The Costume and Set Designs of ‘The Great Gatsby’

It begins gently, in patchy black-and-white that, accompanied by somber music, turns into a depth-enhancing color 3-D frame that provides an equivalent for Luhrmann’s previous red curtains and at length gives way to the famous green light at the end of Daisy’s pier. Curiously, we are introduced to Nick ( Tobey Maguire ) as a patient in a sanitarium, where he begins to tell a doctor ( Jack Thompson ) the story of what happened during the summer of 1922.

Luhrmann’s cultural collisions and dislocations then commence as a synthesis of archival footage and CGI (some of which looks to feature the Empire State Building and other yet-to-be-built skyscrapers a decade before their time, and one shot featuring an unlikely copy of James Joyce ‘s Ulysses, which had only just been published in Paris) inflected on the track by modern music, all to the purpose of evoking the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald did so much to name and popularize. A polite lad of modest means trying to find a toehold on Wall Street, Nick was at Yale with rich bruiser Tom Buchanan ( Joel Edgerton ) and has taken a little house in West Egg, Long Island, right across the bay from Tom and his wife, Daisy ( Carey Mulligan ), and in the shadow of the ostentatious mansion owned by the elusive Jay Gatsby.

Everybody from party girls to politicians comes to Gatsby’s extravagant parties, where the booze flows and the music plays and the carousing goes on all night. But no one ever sees the host, whose wealth is surpassed only by his mysteriousness. No one knows where he or his money came from but, during the nocturnal bacchanals, no one much cares.

Luhrmann and his ever-essential design collaborator (and co-producer and wife) Catherine Martin always seem extra-stimulated by such scenes, which involve hundreds of ornate costumes, constant movement and music, which here imposes blends as unlikely as hip hop and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Whether you can abide some of the specific musical choices or not, the way Luhrmann and his music editors mix and match wildly disparate source material is ballsy and impressive; the operating principle is mood and emotion, with a surprise element that can be jarring and/or inspired.

THR COVER: Baz Luhrmann ‘s Despair, Drive and Gamble Behind ‘Great Gatsby’

In time-honored dramatic fashion, Gatsby’s entrance is delayed for a half-hour and, when the moment comes, there’s something in the way it’s shot combined with the self-possessed I-own-the-world smile on Leonardo DiCaprio ‘s face that reminds of the first time you see the young Charles Foster Kane in an earlier film about a fellow with more money than he knows what to do with. This moment and, even more so, in the superb compositions and cutting of Gatsby’s death, show how classically precise Luhrmann can be when he wants to be. Throughout, he photographs DiCaprio the way a movie star used to be shot — glamorously and admiringly, taking full advantage of the charismatic attributes with which only the anointed few are blessed.

Brandishing his favorite phrase, “Old sport,” as well as a slightly affected accent no doubt carefully cultivated to disguise his origins, Gatsby befriends the innocent Nick, whom he asks to arrange a rendezvous with Daisy, his sweetheart from five years earlier when he was a soldier off to Europe and the battlefront. Having already been taken into New York by Tom and his mistress, Myrtle ( Isla Fisher ), for a debauched afternoon, Nick now accompanies Gatsby for lunch at a mixed-race speakeasy with notorious gambling associate Meyer Wolfshiem (curiously impersonated by Indian cinema star Amitabh Bachchan ).

Once Gatsby and Daisy reunite, nearly an hour in, the film settles down a bit to focus on Gatsby’s sincere effort to recapture the girl who got away, who, when he went to war, married rich boy Tom. Gatsby wants to believe they can rewind the clock to the moment when they fell in love, to the purity of what they once had. “If I could just get back to the start,” he says, choosing to ignore Nick’s warning that, “You can’t repeat the past.”

PHOTOS: Baz Luhrmann: Exclusive Portraits of the ‘Great Gatsby’ Director

They do try, organizing a nervous lunch to break the news to Tom, then heading into Manhattan on a sweltering afternoon where, in room at the Plaza, everyone’s truths come tumbling out, followed by tragedy on the road back and, ultimately, in Gatsby’s pool. The precipitating automobile accident is perhaps too sketchily portrayed for full impact, and the final stretch is slowed by too much commentary by Nick, who has become a bit of a bore by now.

Narrator/observer characters like Nick, or Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, are almost always uncomfortable fits onscreen, especially when they’re far more bland and naive than everyone else around them but still prone to making assessments and judgments about people actually living life rather than standing to the side of it. This is exacerbated here by an element of hero worship towards Gatsby that distorts the more wistful, ambivalent attitude conveyed in the book’s final pages. Maguire’s slightly aging boyishness has become tiresome by the film’s second half and a reduction of Nick’s concluding commentary would have helped.

By contrast, we don’t see enough of Daisy’s best friend, the sporty, haughty Jordan Baker, who epitomizes the sort of modern 20th -century woman who has just arrived, newly hatched, in the world and will take from it what she pleases. Australian newcomer Elizabeth Debicki , who, with her towering slim build, black hair and pool-like blue eyes resembles an elongated Zooey Deschanel , is terrific as far as the part goes, but after a few prominent scenes up front, the character recedes.

After a number of roles which, however well acted, may not have been comfortably in his wheelhouse, DiCaprio looks and feels just right as Gatsby; the glamor and allure as at one with his film star persona, he’s sufficiently savvy to convince as a successful bootlegger but still young enough to recapture the hopes and innocence of youth.

VIDEO: New ‘Great Gatsby’ Trailer Offers Beyonce, Lana Del Rey and Platinum Extravagance

Daisy is a difficult character for any actress to embody to everyone’s satisfaction because she’s a woman onto whom the reader tends to project one’s own ideal. Accordingly, viewers will debate whether or not Mulligan has the beauty, the bearing, the dream qualities desired for the part, but she lucidly portrays the desperate tear Daisy feels between her unquestionable love for Gatsby and fear of her husband. Edgerton is excellent as the proud, entitled and seething bully Tom.

Opulence defines the production values, led by Martin’s sets and costumes. As for the use of 3-D by Luhrmann and cinematographer Simon Duggan , it is probably the most naturalistic aspect of the film; only rarely do you notice it in a pronounced way and yet it really does add something to the experience, drawing you in as if escorting you through a series of opening gates, doors and emotional states.

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