The Great Gatsby

Part of what has made “The Great Gatsby” so enduring is that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is a trim, elegant story with themes that touch on American values old and new. And yet as would be his nature, Baz Luhrmann has transformed “The Great Gatsby” into a long, over-stylized melodrama. Because it lacks Fitzgerald’s resounding tone, it’s a glitzy movie stuffed to the brims that feels strangely empty.

Luhrmann spoke on “The Colbert Report” about how modern the book feels after all these years, and no one is arguing with him there. But what does he see as the similarities between the Roaring Twenties and now? Surely it can’t be the economy, music, fashion or ideas about race.

Luhrmann sees the massive parties and equates them to raves on the wildest scale. He sees scantily clad dancers and choreographs them to hip hop, and for everyone else wearing suits, throwing around money and driving flashy custom rides, he sees them all as gangsta.

Make no mistake; the parties in “Gatsby” are grand. Done up in 3-D and bursting with colors, streamers and floating butterflies, Luhrmann throws a gigantic bash. All the greater then in demonstrating Gatsby’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) unwavering love for Daisy (Carey Mulligan), or something like that.

“What’s all this for,” Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) asks Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki). “That, my dear fellow, is the question.” But Luhrmann is too enamored with his 3-D effects and the celebratory nature of it all to justify how any of this speaks more broadly about our time or theirs’.

Like “Moulin Rouge” and “Romeo and Juliet” before it, “Gatsby” sparkles with light and color but also exhausts in garish style. The constant fades create no sense of space, just CGI splendor. The camera is always barrel rolling into rooms, flowing white curtains bursting into the frame as it does. It careens in fifth gear unable to stay put as though the whole movie took place in the passenger seat of Gatsby’s custom yellow cruiser.

Where it innovates from its predecessors is in its use of 3-D, but Luhrmann’s idea of dramatic 3-D storytelling is letting the narrator’s words float and vanish in puffs of smoke as a handwritten scrawl of CGI. 3-D merely serves him to show ghastly visions of faces, places and past events or to make the green light on Daisy’s pier feel like an endless ocean.

Even the performances don’t do much to salvage “Gatsby” from overstuffed mediocrity. DiCaprio, who’s cartoonish, old-timey American accent was more at home in “Django Unchained,” seems like perfect casting for Jay Gatsby, but he’s awfully strained not looking pretentious as he wields a walking stick and uses the phrase “old sport” in every sentence. Mulligan and Maguire are strong choices too, but Mulligan’s performance is listless, hardly becoming the golden girl she’s made out to be.

“Gatsby” has it all; it has money, glamour, class, style and flair, but it’s all a façade. That’s the whole idea behind Fitzgerald’s novel, but strip the parties and the charisma from Luhrmann and you’re left with a giant empty mansion of a movie; special, but ultimately forgotten.

2 ½ stars