Amanda McCrina

Author of Historical Fiction & Fantasy

Category: Film (page 1 of 3)

Thoughts on Luhrmann’s Gatsby

I haven’t seen The Great Gatsby yet, but I’m aware of the polarizing effect it’s been having on critics. Its detractors are quick to point out that there’s very little jazz in this Jazz-Age story, and entirely too much 3D. Its defenders—this Huffington Post writer as prime example—are just as quick to point out that if one dislikes 3D then one may just as easily watch the film in 2D. Besides, the rather anachronistic involvement of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and others on the soundtrack complements the film’s mood quite well. One does not simply walk into Mordor a Baz Luhrmann film expecting historical accuracy, after all.

It’s a decent defense: this is Baz Luhrmann’s film, he can do as he likes with it. But I think another can be made. I feel the critics bashing the film for its lack of attention to historical detail are missing the point. The Great Gatsby isn’t a timeless piece of literature—possibly the Great American Novel—because it’s a window into the lives of New York’s urban elite during the Roaring Twenties. The Great Gatsby (photo: IMDb)That’s one valuable aspect of the novel, to be sure, but—at the risk of arguing authorial intent—it’s not the point. The Great Gatsby endures because it’s a window into our lives, particularly ours as Americans—the transience and meaninglessness of material culture, of misguided ambition, of faulty idealism. It’s not specific to one time or place. I don’t think our understanding of The Great Gatsby needs to be confined within the bounds of 1920s New York. Certainly the Twenties gave F. Scott Fitzgerald a ready canvas to work from, but the story of Gatsby’s tragic love for Daisy is just as relevant today as then, just as searing.

If there’s a problem with Baz Luhrmann’s film it won’t be because of the glittering visuals or the Brooks Brothers costume collaborations or the slick, overproduced, thoroughly modern soundtrack. None of those things compromise the power of the story—as the Huffington Post writer points out, they may even complement the story. The problem will be if the film forgets its own irony.

A film for the occasion

Being a history buff and and a cinephile, from a family of history buffs and cinephiles, I commemorate historical events by watching corresponding historical films on those dates. My family has watched The Longest Day on June 6th for about as long as I can remember. (I admit to watching Titanic on April 15th, too.) Tora! Tora! Tora! (image from IMDb.com)Tomorrow being Pearl Harbor Day, therefore, I’m taking the opportunity to plug one of my all-time-favorite war films, 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!.

I’ve always liked the movie, though when I was younger it was mostly a matter of tolerating the dry, boring stuff in the first half in anticipation of the really good stuff to come in the second half—i.e., the dogfight scene. (It is, admittedly, a remarkable dogfight scene; if I’m not mistaken, Bay and Bruckheimer appropriated footage from it for use in Pearl Harbor over thirty years later.) But it took me a long time to appreciate that the dry, boring stuff isn’t dry or boring at all. Rather, the first half of the film—all the endless political machinations, the missteps and misunderstandings, the stuffy bureaucratic blunders—is brilliantly paced, ratcheting up the tension ever so slowly, laying down, brick by brick, the inevitable collision course between two empires that never really understood one another. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is the perfect accompaniment (don’t skip the intermission; the music sets the mood wonderfully.)

It’s Hollywoodized, of course—for one thing, Yamamoto never made the famous “sleeping giant” speech that occurs during the striking final scene of the film—but it’s an important historical account nevertheless, since it presents both sides’ retrospective interpretation of the events. Japanese directors and actors tell the Japanese side of the story (in Japanese, which is wonderful; for some inexplicable reason, the same filmmakers decided that the Japanese characters should speak English in the star-studded but very-much-inferior Midway, which came six years later). In many ways, for better or worse, Tora! Tora! Tora! has helped shape our modern understanding of the attack. It’s worth watching for that reason alone, but it’s highly entertaining, too, and still near-perfect technically—it really hasn’t aged that much at all, even given the advances in film technology over the past half-century. Goes to show that CGI will never replace good, old-fashioned filmmaking.

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