NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby

[Mark Kohut]

Imagination is what we are supposed to have faith in. Gatsby did.


From: Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com>
To: Andreis Passarinho <eastcocker at gmail.com>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 11:34 PM
Subject: Re: NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby



@Passarinho:

Weirdly, all I could think during the final third is how much better suited to Jay Gatsby Tobey was.

Unlike Rich I believe DiCaprio has ability & has featured in a couple of top-notch dramas, but his range & skills have been pretty consistently underutilized--  Scorcese / Tarantino notwithstanding.  In this case I suspect he was cast as Gatsby because he had the name to make it a top-grossing flick.  Per his acting, he did what he's known for doing, including hair-trigger bouts of anger.  I wasn't impressed because I didn't feel his performance suited a man doing his best to sell a Big Con:  the lines poured out of Leo in a tumult like the worst kind of liar.  McGuire would have been more reserved, I think, more capable of selling Jay's fibs.  But that's not the movie that got made, so.

Baz's directing was entirely too complicated for my tastes, too, detracting from Selling The Story.  Every shot was a technical effect, a crosscut, a fade, a pan, a push, layered with CG, etc etc etc.  Atop the hunchbacked wedding cake of for-film framing device, narrative voiceover, overlapping dialogue and hypercompensated soundtrack it was much too much.  It's as though the GG was trying to live up to the legend of The Anachronistic Director, but all it really did for me was highlight the overall artifice, transforming it into yet another big budget film pornographically frosted with 'production value'.  Some tales you can get away with everything being in some way FX-driven, but Gatsby's story?  Not so much.  It gains nothing from all the artifice.  Jay's success story (a lie) perverts & distorts his death (robbing it of truth) in the same way the director's style keeps the audience at a distance by continually reminding us that we're watching
 a movie.  What are we supposed to have faith in here exactly?  Fitzgerald didn't have to remind us god was watching.

I'm not asking for grim-and-gritty realism, mind.  Just, I dunno, maybe a little more finesse.  But I knew what I was getting into when the first trailer featured that screamo rendition of 'So Happy Together'.

'Strictly Ballroom' and 'Romeo & Juliet', I dug.  Still dig.  This... wasn't made for me.  At least my girlfriend was happy with it.  She's more of a Fitzgerald fan than I am, so maybe I'm missing something?
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