No life in Leo DiCaprio’s ‘Gatsby’

No life in Leo DiCaprio’s ‘Gatsby’

The Great Gatsby” Rated PG-13. At AMC Boston Common, Regal Fenway 13 and suburban theaters. Grade: C- Forget about making a zombie-movie version of “The Great Gatsby.” It’s already here. If there is a recognizably human character in Baz Luhrmann’s wax museum adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 Jazz Age novel, I did not see him or her. In the midst of all the lifeless eye candy, flying confetti, tinsel, streamers and fireworks stands the pomaded, tuxedo-clad Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose tan has pumpkin highlights and who has no pulse. Former “Spider-Man” Tobey Maguire’s narrator-sidekick Nick Carraway is a crack-voiced aspiring writer. Carey Mulligan’s Daisy Buchanan sports dresses made of feathers and tassels and is not quite as gorgeously sculpted as her leading man. That she is the sylph-like Art Deco dream girl and femme fatale who lures Gatsby to his doom seems dubious. DiCaprio’s Gatsby appears cobbled together from his OCD Howard Hughes in “The Aviator” and bits of the dream-tormented Teddy Daniels of “Shutter Island.” Like the novel, the film is a love story and gangster-movie parable about a mysterious, fabulously wealthy young(ish in this case) man living in palatial splendor in Fitzgerald’s idyllic West Egg, a Long Island oceanfront paradise just outside of swinging, flapper-era Manhattan. Unlike East Eggers Daisy and her unfaithful, polo-playing husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton in Clark Gable mustache) or her cousin Nick, Gatsby, who dresses to the nines, tens and elevens, is not from “old money.” He’s nouveau riche, although he claims to be an “Oxford man” and calls everyone “old sport,” which DiCaprio pronounces awkwardly. After staging a computer-generated racing scene with Gatsby’s supercharged roadster and a PG-13 orgy with Tom, Nick, Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) and some floozies, Luhrmann turns his attention to the bacchanalian parties thrown by Gatsby. The relentless snip-snip-snip editing of the film is cued to the bat of an eye, the swivel of a hip, a butt shake, a shrugged shoulder. This isn’t directing. It’s choreography. (“The Great Gatsby” contains violence, sexually suggestive scenes and scenes of drunken revelry.)


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