If anyone could pull off a multiplex-friendly adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — a film treatment that might be capable of stepping out of the long shadow cast by the book — it’s Moulin Rouge showman Baz Luhrmann, right? The Australian director who dragged Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers into the music-video-shaken, bullet-ridden ’90s with Romeo + Juliet and compressed a century’s worth of pop music and melodrama into the glorious Moulin Rouge?
In fact Luhrmann is least interesting when most restrained, as in the relatively stodgy Australia. And every breathlessly reported aspect of his Gatsby — from the choice to re-create ’20s New York in Australia, to the decision to shoot in 3-D, to the incorporation of Jay-Z-approved hip-hop and R&B — suggests he has opted not to rein in the excessive impulses that have served him well in the past.
The film itself turns out to be an unapologetically garish riot of color and costumery parading before a restless camera, and for a while Luhrmann’s go-for-broke impulses serve him well. Where too many directors seem at a loss to turn 3-D to advantage, Luhrmann uses it aggressively, plunging viewers into Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age metropolis and realizing opulently decorated homes, bustling streets and an even more bustling underworld with equal care.
In the film’s first act he turns the innocence-corroding journey of new-to-town narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire, convincing as a wide-eyed innocent even as he advances well beyond Peter Parker age) into a mad rush of discovery. It will climax, of course, in that riotous party at the mansion of Nick’s mysterious, nouveau riche neighbor J. Gatsby, a man much spoken of in the early going but little seen.
When Luhrmann finally reveals the title character, he does so as assorted partygoers work themselves into a frenzy, “Rhapsody in Blue” pounds on the soundtrack and fireworks explode in the sky. It’s a glorious bit of moviemaking that doubles as a master class in the fine art of going effectively over the top. Unfortunately, the film is never again as successful; from here on, it has to dig into the bothersome business of telling Fitzgerald’s story.