BAZ LUHRMAN'S "THE GREAT GATSBY" -- NOT SO MUCH

Frankly, it was a huge disappointment.

My first mistake was to see it in 3-D — a medium, I discovered, unsuitable for serious, intimate drama, inasmuch as my previous experience conditioned me to view 3-D as a conduit for cartoons and action flicks derived therefrom — a predisposition I found impossible to shake. To my great surprise, rather than adding realism, the 3-D subtracted from it. The director, Baz Luhrman, in fully exercising the special effects capabilities of the 3-D medium for the mise-en-scéne (particularly the surreal, over-the-top party scenes at the beginning), infused the entire production, including the characters, with an aura of unreality, as if all had been digitally rendered.

I was baffled by the music. Rather than evoking the o-bodeo-do/Charleston/Rudy Vallee music of the period, Luhrman pummeled the audience with a loud, anachronistic thumping disco beat, making the party seem like a rave, rather than a gathering of 1920s New York swells. In fact, with the exceptions of the period costumes and automobiles and Gatsby’s endless, and ultimately annoying, repetition of “Old Sport,” I could discern very little evocation of the Jazz Age. Even the singer at the party resembling Cab Calloway, was anachronistic, given that Calloway came into prominence in the 30s and 40s. In all, I had little sense of immersion into the period.

The staging, cinematography, frantic pacing and special effects were too slick by half, making it impossible to relate intimately to the characters. Until the scene where the principal characters have it out in the N.Y. hotel room, I felt I was watching a series of elaborately staged tableaux in which the characters were mannequin-like props, leaving me totally unengaged. The first presentation of Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby was so elaborately staged it shouted “manipulation,” like the audience’s introduction to Clark Gable in GWTW. The actors acquitted themselves as well as could be expected — especially in the powerful denouement in the N.Y. Hotel scene -- but the subtle psychological nuances of character and Fitzgerald’s voice in Nick Carraway’s narration became virtually lost in the production, given the distracting visual spectacle. This was melodrama, not drama.

(Spoiler alert.)

Feeling disengaged from the characters, like Morales in A Chorus Line, when Gatsby died “I felt nothing” -- for me, that void pretty much sums it up.