Luhrmann: The Great Gatsby (2013)

Baz Luhrmann is more a master of anachronism than adaptation, conjoining canonical texts and traditions with everything that might seem incommensurate with them. That incommensurability has always had a spatial component, but it’s perfected in The Great Gatsby, which alternates mise-en-scenes cluttered with an unimaginable number of visual planes with mise-en-scenes dominated by single, monolithic, remote visual planes. In both cases, there’s almost a sense of depth perception, but not quite, making for something like 2.5D cinema – it looks too sculptural to be 2D cinema, but too flat to be 3D cinema. That’s peculiarly appropriate for a novel that’s perpetually poised at the breathless cusp between inside and outside – “once again, I was within and without” – meaning that the more anachronistic the film becomes, the truer it actually feels to Fitzgerald’s particular brand of romanticism, as if to suggest that anachronism has become the only authentic way to reflect upon our disconnection from the past. And it’s that odd fidelity that makes it Luhrmann’s most audaciously romantic film since Romeo + Juliet – swathed in gorgeous, pastel crepuscularity, texured by glints of impending or receding warmth, everything gleams with the transitory fragility of early dawn and late dusk. That’s not to say it’s exactly warm – in fact, it’s shot through with the peculiar coldness and emptiness of “a man with nothing but a grand vision.” But there’s something immersive and cushioning about that vision, even as individual characters and figures become less distinct, subsumed into Gatsby’s dream-architecture - unlike the 1974 version, and Fitzgerald’s novel itself, this version of the story is told from Gatsby’s perspective, with all the lurid cosmicity that entails. At times, it’s almost as if the characters’ perceptions have been jettisoned from their bodies to hover at the closest window, jetty or threshold, just as the film’s 2.5D style means that the spectator is destined to hover at the threshold of their 3D glasses, at the threshold of visibility, much like Fitzgerald's most pregnant and powerful images.