The Boom

The Great Gatsby (2013) is a brashly kinetic adaptation of a literary landmark. Filled with flaws of taste, it nonetheless has a primal power, balancing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Americana lyricism with a eurotrash sensibility. Baz Luhrmann’s direction goes beyond realism—beyond hyperrealism, even—into a garishly ornate romanticism, a jewel-encrusted, stylized vision of the 1920s as distant from historical reality as a fairy tale. Luhrmann makes the florid hysteria of Ken Russell (The Devils, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah) seem tranquil by comparison. But Fitzgerald’s poignant, homespun longing elevates this movie above Russell’s emotional barrenness.

Boulevard of broken dreams.

Except for Leonardo DiCaprio (a clotheshorse who looks a little pudgy around the jowls), the cast is much too tightly controlled by the iron-clamp production to be able to create human beings with believable idiosyncrasies—the kind of visual or verbal toss-offs or imperfections that allow a performance to breathe, to acquire deeper and sometimes darker dimensions as a movie unfolds. The actors, including the appealing Tobey Maguire as Nick, Carey Mulligan as an unmagical Daisy, Joel Edgerton (whose face is as stony as Gary Cooper) as the cruelly pragmatic Tom, and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan, are unfortunately all swamped; they’re doll-like props in Luhrmann’s explosive tableaus. New York is designed like a steampunk variation of Jules Verne, and the Art Deco mansions look like steely, cartoonish Studio 54s. This is the sort of production design that blurs the line between movie dreams and nightmares. (You might want to bring aspirin for after the movie.)

DiCaprio is able to do more than adopt Jazz Age poses against these flaming tableaus. He impressively navigates the megatechnology and whiz-bang camera (which swoops over Manhattan like a Star Wars spacecraft), and he steals a great many scenes (except perhaps those with his gorgeous Duesenberg, whose shimmering yellow coat of paint mirrors Gatsby’s tailored suit). Nearly a century after it was published, Gatsby’s self-made man stills pulls people in deeply enough so that their emotions are profoundly resonant. In post-Horatio-Alger America, Gatsby was serendipitously mentored, financed, and launched. Fitzgerald’s golden tale has exerted its power through four or five film versions (and another several TV adaptations), always washing away most of the production flaws. American audiences are attached to Fitzgerald at the hip—fixated on the boulevard-of-broken-dreams theme of corrupted hope, which is the green light of our collective movie past.

Poop Deck

Titanic (1997) is, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “too much of water.” The movie sinks long before the ship does. If the dewily pubescent love story doesn’t interest you (in other words, if you’re older than sixteen), there’s not much else to do but observe the cold impressiveness of the production. CGI has become unnaturally realistic—you’re not sure what’s actually being filmed and what’s being inserted digitally after filming, although you can sense that certain elements in the mise en scène have unnatural distortions or undulations, like the flags billowing and clanging against the flagpoles in the departure scene. The filmmakers don’t use real flags because they’re not real enough. The gigantism of the movie’s megaproduction works against it; in your CGI-induced stupor, you don’t much care whether the thousands of extras drown or not, and the tragic dimensions of the narrative are largely lost under the onslaught of the “dazzling” production design.

Dewy young love. Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet

But the director (James Cameron) has a plan (he’s thought of everything, it seems). He wraps up all the noise and bar-room brawls and fiery sunsets and Irish rogues and snooty upper-crust travelers with a Hallmark-weepy framing device—the lovely young woman (Kate Winslet) is now a sentimental old woman (Gloria Stuart) telling her story to a science team exploring the wreck off the Newfoundland coast. She throws her keepsake from the young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) into the waves and watches it sink, the way she watched the young man sink beneath the icy surface as she vainly tried to cling to him. This sentimental banality is what moves audiences and convinces them they’re watching a great romantic movie. My dissenting view is that Titanic is three and a quarter hours of humorless portentousness. I was able to collect my thoughts during a few of the scenes, including the awesome moment of impact, when shards and chunks of the iceberg catapulted onto the ship and skidded along the deck.

Despite the technology on display, most of the movie just doesn’t seem real or fresh. The two young lovers make out in an automobile in the cargo area, and my mind flashed back to the same scene in Now, Voyager (1942). It’s Hollywood epic-prestige moviemaking without a pumping heart. The thing about movies like Titanic is that they’re so conventional-minded in their thinking and so calculating that they’re boring. There’s nothing playful or extemporaneous in the entire picture—every element is worked out precisely and mechanically beforehand. It’s an entire universe that exists digitally. How can a story about large-scale human tragedy be so machine-tooled and impersonal? That’s what I mean when I say a movie doesn’t breathe: its pores are clogged with contrivance. What’s wrong with a little surprise, a little idiosyncrasy in the telling, especially in such a long film? The camera work, the dialogue, the acting, the lighting, the directing have all had the life squeezed out of them. When the poor ship sinks, it’s like a symbol of the entire movie sinking under the weight of its own production.