If You Build It, She Will Come: An Appreciation of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013)

Abstract

‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ (Fitzgerald 172). Those famous last words of The Great Gatsby still echo into the present and the latest adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s examination of the ironies of hope in the jazz age. The line could stand for the constant urge of filmmakers to adapt bygone literature from comic books to classics. Here, though, I will gloss over the legions of superannuated superhero stories that now constitute Hollywood’s standard vision of future profitability, in favour of a couple of against-the-current attempts to screen the classics. In 2012, Joe Wright tackled Tolstoy and produced a high-concept version of Anna Karenina that glittered with audacious invention and pictorial opulence. Last year, Baz Luhrmann, with more than a little help from his wife, designer Catherine Martin, worked over Gatsby in similar fashion, but on a rather grander scale. Bizarrely, Luhrmann conceived his Gatsby adaptation on a Russian train, the very nemesis of poor Anna Karenina (Viner).