...and One of Them Days...
...now in theaters.
Showing posts with label ISLA FISHER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ISLA FISHER. Show all posts
Friday, January 31, 2025
Friday, May 10, 2013
TO GATSBY OR NOT TO GATSBY
It sounds like a joke: “The Great Gatsby, in 3-D.” What’s next, The Grapes of Wrath in 3-D? The Old Man and the Sea in 3-D? Catcher in the Rye in 3-D? What other high-school English class assignment classics could we watch in dorky dark glasses?
Oddly, though, it sort of works in the case of this Gatsby. The director of this new version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald tale is Baz Luhrmann, and he takes more or less the same approach to it that he did to Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom—which is to say, a combination of Bollywood and Busby Berkeley on speed. So his lunging, plunging, swooping camera seemed to pack a little extra punch from the 3-D in a way that most recent offerings in the format—the superhero and animated flicks—have not.
Strictly in terms of plot, it’s a pretty faithful retelling of the 1925 novel about the title mystery man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who shows up at the ritzy end of Long Island. But it couldn’t be much farther away in tone from Fitzgerald’s famously balanced, plangent prose. Despite the solemn narration by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the style is all wild whip pans and fast cutting and undulating aerial shots that carry us from new money “West Egg” to old money “East Egg” and back, and sometimes all the way in to Manhattan.
Gatsby, a West Egger, throws decadent jazz-and-flapper parties in which he doesn’t usually participate. His neighbor and tenant Nick sees Gatsby gazing longingly at the “green light” across the bay, on the dock of the East Egg estate where Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) lives with her blueblood ape of a husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). Needless to say, there’s some history there.
I’ve always been fond of this yarn, with its fairy-tale backstory. Like many durable American fables, it’s rooted in seriously adolescent notions, about reinventing yourself and impressing the girl of your dreams with grand gesture, but what gives it its power was that Fitzgerald knew, first-hand, that the fix was in when it came to Gatsby’s dream of making himself acceptable to the old money class—if he’d simply wanted to be rich or famous, he could have managed it easily enough, but he wanted to be One Of Them. That he wanted this for, from his point of view, the most gallant and romantic of reasons mattered not at all.
Once you’ve accepted that this is Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, not Fitzgerald’s, you’re likely to feel that this is the most successful adaptation of the story. It’s highly uneven—in particular, it runs out of steam toward the end—but it’s more satisfying, overall, than the drab 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, and much more than the plodding 1974 version starring Robert Redford, and this has at least as much to do with the leading man as it does with Luhrmann.
Neither Redford nor Ladd was the real problem with their respective productions; both did their level best with the part. But neither of them captured the subtly frantic, terrified side of Gatsby’s psychology like DiCaprio does. This makes it possible, as it usually isn’t, to find some pity for Daisy, to see how even life with the cloddish, philandering Tom might offer her more breathing space than Gatsby’s obsessive devotion.
Even more than this, though, for the story to be convincing, Gatsby must have a radiant glamour that transcends acting, or even beauty. In one of the book’s most famous passages, Nick describes Gatsby’s smile:
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
When DiCaprio smiles into the camera here, he comes closer to capturing this quality than any previous Gatsby I’ve seen. Maybe it was just the 3-D.
Strictly in terms of plot, it’s a pretty faithful retelling of the 1925 novel about the title mystery man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who shows up at the ritzy end of Long Island. But it couldn’t be much farther away in tone from Fitzgerald’s famously balanced, plangent prose. Despite the solemn narration by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the style is all wild whip pans and fast cutting and undulating aerial shots that carry us from new money “West Egg” to old money “East Egg” and back, and sometimes all the way in to Manhattan.
Gatsby, a West Egger, throws decadent jazz-and-flapper parties in which he doesn’t usually participate. His neighbor and tenant Nick sees Gatsby gazing longingly at the “green light” across the bay, on the dock of the East Egg estate where Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) lives with her blueblood ape of a husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). Needless to say, there’s some history there.
I’ve always been fond of this yarn, with its fairy-tale backstory. Like many durable American fables, it’s rooted in seriously adolescent notions, about reinventing yourself and impressing the girl of your dreams with grand gesture, but what gives it its power was that Fitzgerald knew, first-hand, that the fix was in when it came to Gatsby’s dream of making himself acceptable to the old money class—if he’d simply wanted to be rich or famous, he could have managed it easily enough, but he wanted to be One Of Them. That he wanted this for, from his point of view, the most gallant and romantic of reasons mattered not at all.
Once you’ve accepted that this is Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, not Fitzgerald’s, you’re likely to feel that this is the most successful adaptation of the story. It’s highly uneven—in particular, it runs out of steam toward the end—but it’s more satisfying, overall, than the drab 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, and much more than the plodding 1974 version starring Robert Redford, and this has at least as much to do with the leading man as it does with Luhrmann.
Neither Redford nor Ladd was the real problem with their respective productions; both did their level best with the part. But neither of them captured the subtly frantic, terrified side of Gatsby’s psychology like DiCaprio does. This makes it possible, as it usually isn’t, to find some pity for Daisy, to see how even life with the cloddish, philandering Tom might offer her more breathing space than Gatsby’s obsessive devotion.
Even more than this, though, for the story to be convincing, Gatsby must have a radiant glamour that transcends acting, or even beauty. In one of the book’s most famous passages, Nick describes Gatsby’s smile:
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
When DiCaprio smiles into the camera here, he comes closer to capturing this quality than any previous Gatsby I’ve seen. Maybe it was just the 3-D.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
FROST HIT
Given his abstract-impressionist’s brush on window glass, you might imagine Jack Frost would be the artsy, snooty sort. But according to Rise of the Guardians, Jack’s a friendly, mischievous boy, eager for acceptance, dismayed that the kids who have him to thank for snow days and sledding fun can’t see him.
Jack, voiced by Chris Pine, is the hero of the computer-animated flick, conflated from William Joyce’s series of children’s books. The title characters are the legendary or allegorical figures who watch over childhood wonder, hopes and dreams. The others include Santa Claus, voiced like a radio-comedy Russian by Alec Baldwin, the Tooth Fairy, a winsome half-woman/half-hummingbird voiced by Isla Fisher, and the tough, Aussie-accented Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), who comes armed with a boomerang, but also has the tendency to leave a blooming flower in his burrow’s wake.
Best of all, maybe, is the Sandman, a roly-poly sort who doesn’t speak, but communicates by shaping his thoughts in sand over his head. They’ve all received their commissions from the omniscient—and thus, of course, highly enigmatic—Man in the Moon, and now it’s Jack Frost’s turn. If he becomes a full-fledged Guardian, then the kids may actually believe in him like they do Santa or the Bunny, and thus be able to catch a glimpse of him.
The menace is Pitch Black, aka the Boogeyman, given a nicely ironic, tut-tutting voice by Jude Law. Pitch is a simply pale figure in a brown robe, attended by a stamping herd of terrifying black horses—nightmares, of course.
Nostalgic for the Dark Ages, the salad days of terror and despair, Pitch looks to make a comeback, and he’s no minor adversary. So the Guardians must put aside their egos and grudges—even the Bunny, who resents Jack for the “Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday—and unify to defend childhood wonder.
Like last year’s fine Arthur Christmas, among other kid movies, Rise of the Guardians plays with the childhood desire to literalize and reconcile the difficult logistics connected to the duties of these symbolic figures, and does it in funny and imaginative ways. It also features an exciting action finale and many good jokes and some thrilling images, like the Sandman’s good dreams—sand-cast dinosaurs and sting-rays and dolphins—trooping to the rescue down suburban streets. That it’s not the best animated movie of the year testifies not to its weakness but to the genre’s strength these days.
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