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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: May 2013

Review: “The Great Gatsby”

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

baz lurhmann, carey mulligan, drama, joel edgerton, leonardo dicaprio, the great gatsby, tobey macguire

the_great_gatsby_movie-wide

“The Last Tycoon”

Grade: B+

IN THE AFTERGLOW of a loud, lavish and limousine-laden party – thrown for the sole purpose of winning back an old girlfriend named Daisy Fay – host Jay Gatsby tells Nick, his neighbor and friend, that the past is never set in stone.  “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick protests, to which the consummate self-made man, Gatsby, replies: “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!”

It’s a crucial difference in opinion and one that captures the American essence of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic “The Great Gatsby,” printed in April of 1925 and foisted on 20120719144128!Gatsby_1925_jackethigh-school freshmen ever since. (The paperback edition, which was already selling more than a half million copies annually, is currently back on top.) The novel’s titular tragic hero is the very emblem of the nouvelle riche and as the lord of Long Island Sound, he’s been catapulted from an anonymous Midwestern existence as a Great War veteran to the mysterious man-of-the-hour.  Lots of Gatsby’s neighbors are in Nick’s ear about whether he’s a killer, a bootlegger, or truly the owner of a successful franchise of pharmacies. Nick is played by the typically neuter Tobey Maguire.

But if Gatsby is the American Dream incarnate, a man who emphatically holds that the past and the future can be bent toward any ambitious man’s objectives, his life plays out as a kind of lonely nightmare. (Don Draper of “Mad Men” is just a reworking of the Gatsby archetype.)  His rosebud Daisy is now a married mother and Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, is one of many looking to expose him as anything but great.  Possessing what Fitzgerald describes as a “cruel body,” Tom is a racist and a philanderer with a married mistress named Myrtle waiting in the wings.  A hostile Tom – I can remember Mrs. Maroney, my high school English teacher, exclaiming “I hate Tom!” – denigrates his rival as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.”

Now 38 years old, Leonardo DiCaprio fits the role of Gatsby to a (sun-tanned) T.  We’ve watched this actor transform from the cat-eyed androgyne of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “Titanic” to the square-headed hulk of “J. Edgar” and “The Aviator.”  Those latter biopics, centered on reclusive and enigmatic men, have prepared DiCaprio well for the role of James Gatz/Jay Gatsby, who roams his stately pleasure-dome likeLeonardo DiCaprio Charles Foster Kane.  As Daisy, Carey Mulligan (“Drive,” “Shame”) is mostly mute, torn as she is between her own flame and the unfaithful husband who provides her a mansion of her own across the bay. Tom is played by the Australian actor Joel Edgerton (“Zero Dark Thirty”) whose blue eyes flicker ferociously back and forth when he is finally confronted by Gatsby in a swelteringly hot Manhattan hotel room.  “Your wife doesn’t love you,” Gatsby tells Tom, “She’s never loved you.  She loves me.”

Much of what I’ve already laid out here are plot points, because they remain every bit as compelling and air-tight as they are on the page.  Unfortunately, what stands in the way of “The Great Gatsby” becoming as great a film as it is a novel is largely due to the direction of Baz Lurhmann, the Aussie director famous for the MTV-style editing and splashy art direction he brought to “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.”  Those films succeed as great-gatsby-joel-edgertonstagey spectacles – stabbings, solos, cancan lines – whereas the source material here is a more hushed, low-key affair.  (Even the climactic murder, in the novel, is described after the fact and left to the reader’s imagination.) Lurhmann’s hyperactivity is well suited to the gaudy opulence of Gatsby’s high-points – described by Fitzgerald as a “universe of ineffable gaudiness” – but he can’t seem to represent the man’s emotional lows.  It was a mistake to make the place from which Nick narrates his tale a sanitarium, and awfully literal-minded as well to type out some of the novel’s more famous lines across the screen, as if a Power-Point presentation were needed to heighten the drama.  Lurhmann’s touch is really more of a stranglehold.

This is not to say that “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t lend itself to flashiness, especially in terms of the novel’s automobiles which are, in Lurhmann’s kaleidoscopic reimagining of the tale, as gorgeous as the interiors of Gatsby’s wedding-cake mansion.  DaisyTHE GREAT GATSBY CAST FILM IN SYDNEY Fay, back in her Louisville days, had a “little white roadster,” writes Fitzgerald; there’s Tom’s blue coupé and the so-called “death car” that sets the double demise of Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby into motion.  Even Nick frames his libido (or lack thereof) in automotive terms, saying that he is “slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.”  Putting the brakes a bit on Lurhmann’s style would have made this “Gatsby” greater – less tinsel and more teeth.

Note:

I want to thank all of my followers but after two years of writing film reviews for CINEMAWOLF, I realize that keeping a truly state-of-the-art blog is a full-time job and the demands of my professional life prevent me from staying current here, so this is likely my final film review.  You can find my reviews in print in The G&LR and elsewhere.  I wish all of you a long life as grand as Gatsby’s!

Review: “Mud”

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

drama, jacob lofland, jeff nichols, joe don baker, mark twain, matthew mcconaughey, michael shannon, mississippi river, mud, ray mckinnon, reese witherspoon, sam shepard, sarah paulson, toni morrison, tye sheridan

Mud Banner Poster

“Mississippi Moon, Won’t You Keep On Shinin’ On Me”

Grade: A-

MARK TWAIN NEVER forgot the Mississippi.  In 1856, he left Ohio for Louisiana by steamboat, intending to travel on the Amazon.  Fortunately, Twain changed his mind and apprenticed for a Mississippi riverboat pilot and the rest is (American literary) history.  “The great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun,” he wrote in one of his earliest sketches about that river.  Twain would no doubt have found the new film “Mud” from Jeff Nichols – who reportedly asked his cast to read the author while on set – a marvel, rich as it is with local color, narrative density, and feeling.  It’s full steam ahead for Nichols, whose previous films include the little masterpieces, “Shotgun Stories” (2007) and “Take Shelter” (2011).

A coming-of-age tale, “Mud” centers around two boys named Ellis (Tye Sheridan of “Tree of Life”) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland).  American kids don’t really explore the 000020.17055.MUD_Film_Still1woods and streams anymore – there are apps for that now – which is why the boys’ backwoods existence evokes a golden age when childhood was the closest thing to freedom.  Ellis and Neckbone discover a remote island with a boat inexplicably wedged in the treetops up high. There’s a well-executed panning shot – compliments of director of photography Adam Stone – in which the boys first encounter the island’s sole inhabitant, a stranger with an even stranger name: Mud (Matthew McConaughey, in his best starring role to date).  Mud’s too amicable and avuncular to be dangerous – Ellis takes an immediate liking to him – and for a while, the boys shuttle between their families (played by Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson as Ellis’s feuding parents) and ornery neighbor Tom Blakenship (a buzz-cut Sam Shepard), bringing Mud the canned food he needs to survive on the lam. Michael Shannon, the star of Nichols’ previous films, is Neckbone’s guardian, Uncle Galen; he’s busy scouring the river bottom for oysters and banging around in the equipment of a deep-sea diver.

But no man, of course, is an island, and Mud’s criminal past connects the boys to a whole host of problems in their tiny Arkansas town.  Mud’s back story is a romantic one: he’s killed the Texas lover of his on-again-off-again girlfriend named Juniper x.MUD_.0426(Reese Witherspoon) who has brought him nothing but trouble.  Driven by what Toni Morrison calls one of those “deepdown, spooky loves” that make one “so sad and happy,” Mud and Juniper are the kind of couple that send restraining-orders as love-notes.  Tom Blakenship blames all of Mud’s trouble on Juniper and, as a ex-military sharpshooter, he comes in handy when the father of Mud’s victim (Joe Don Baker) brings a bunch of hired guns to town to track Mud down.  It’s all in the nonverbal dialogue when Juniper spots Mud (temporarily off the island) from the balcony of her run-down motel; it’s Nichols’ riff on “Romeo and Juliet” with the same collision of eros and violence.

Gender politics, as usual, muddy the waters and the script’s only failure is that its conflicted relation to women and femininity feels, well, Twain-era. It becomes clear that Ellis and Mud are leading parallel lives, for the Huck-like Ellis is crushing on an older girl named May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant) who breaks his heart in the way JuniperIMG_3962.CR2 breaks Mud’s over and over again. Because Ellis’s father is estranged from his mother (the underrated Paulson), he warns his son that all women are snakes, selfish and impossible to please.  “Mud” doesn’t really disavow Ellis (or the audience) of that biblical bunk except for Mud’s corrective, which comes later in the moments before a river-boat shoot-out.  Mud assures the boy that women are worth loving, but is “Mud” really on board?  The film’s women remain archetypal and far-off.

Mud’s island, meanwhile, is a wondrous place; it’s the ultimate man-cave wherein he’s planning his escape by river but also a dangerous place replete with a hissing snake pit (foreshadowed well from the film’s start).  Nichols’ “Mud” is that rare work of art that achieves something tantamount to Twain’s best stories (for adults and children): it reminds you, simultaneously, of what it was like to be a child but also what it’s like to feel – however incompletely – all grown-up.

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