FILM REVIEW: THE GREAT GATSBY

A scene from The Great Gatsby.

Egg on the system

By Don Simpson

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is manufactured in three dimensions of pure, unfiltered opulence. Taking its narrative cues from Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann’s hyper-real universe is constructed by the storytelling devices of embellishment and exaggeration. Told entirely in flashback, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a patient in a sanitarium as he begins to regurgitate his intoxicated recollections of the Summer of 1922. While telling his own story, Nick pieces together the personal history of his mysterious and eccentric neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). In conveying Gatsby’s story, Nick delves into the unreliable narrative of a man who created his entire life out of nothing. No one truly knows Gatsby because his history is all just an infinitely elaborate ruse. Luhrmann luxuriates in Gatsby’s knack for re-imagining and re-constructing the past — as Gatsby weaves unreal tales about himself, filtered for our consumption through the flowery verbosity of Nick’s prose, the film soaks in the artifice of the unbridled extravagance.

Showcasing the unreliability of Nick’s memories and Gatsby’s tall tales, Luhrmann interjects easily identifiable untruths into the film, such as mixing pop culture reference points of our present with the cultural counterparts of the 1920s. In doing so, Luhrmann establishes clear associations between the pop culture of the 1920s and the present. Hot jazz is mashed-up with hip hop and electronic music; the sexually provocative dancing of the 1920s is blended with modern dance; even the drunken debauchery of 1920s petting parties is modernized and amped up to near-Spring Breakers proportions.

Of course, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbyfunctions as a critique of its characters’ overindulgence and gross decadence. It is a cautionary tale of becoming so engrossed in fantastical parties that reality all but fades away. Luhrmann, however, seems more interested in condemning the 1920s as the birth of the self-made man. Gatsby is very much a product of the capitalist free enterprise system which professes the concept that anyone can become rich. The stock market made it easy to get rich quick; so did bootlegging and other illegal enterprises. Traditionally wealthy families of East Egg such as Tom Buchanan’s (Joel Edgerton), who “earned” their money, looked down upon the new rich of West Egg like Gatsby, who lied and cheated their way into wealth.

The infinite levels of hyperactive falseness do not bode well for the dialogue and plot, which are mere afterthoughts for a man of style-over-substance such as Luhrmann. While most of Nick’s voiceover narrative does retain the literary fortitude of Fitzgerald’s poetic finesse, the dialogue seems overly-simplified and watered-down. The plot may hit most of the primary scenes of Fitzgerald’s novel, but Luhrmann seems much more comfortable conveying the themes of the story with visual allusions rather than words. This might have been a more interesting film if Luhrmann kept his actors silent, since they are often left spouting relatively pointless dialogue while having to rely upon pantomime to convey their character’s real emotions. On that note, DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan (who plays Daisy by way of flawlessly channeling Clara Bow) prove that they would have made fantastic silent film actors.

FILM REVIEW: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) in Wuthering Heights.

On the lower half

By Ed Rampell

A while back audiences experienced a series of screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s 19^th century novels. Now, we seem to have a cinematic cycle of revivals of the Brontë Sisters’ Gothic romances. Charlotte’s oft-filmed Jane Eyre (the first movie version was shot by 1910) returned to the big screen last year. Now it’s the turn of Emily Brontë’s likewise much made (originally in 1920) and much-remade Wuthering Heights (published in 1847) to be reincarnated on the silver screen. So what’s different and new about English director Andrea Arnold’s rendition, which she co-wrote with Olivia Hetreed (Girl With a Pearl Earring)?

At first blush, one might think that adding an interracial dimension to this tale of thwarted love is a brand new 21^stcentury brainstorm. I hate to dampen the Eureka! moment, but William Wyler’s 1939 version -- the most famous adaptation, this Best Picture Oscar nominee was co-written by no less than Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and John Huston -- co-starred Englishmen Laurence Olivier and David Niven, who played opposite Merle Oberon. While her character, Catherine Earnshaw, is certainly of pure British pedigree, Ms. Oberon herself was reportedly born in Bombay and of Welsh-Indian ancestry. So the inter-ethnic element was already arguably implicit in Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, although to be fair it is far more explicitly explored in Arnold’s film.

Solomon Glave, who plays young Heathcliff, and James Howson, who portrays Heathcliff as a young man, both appear to be black, UK-born actors who make their acting debuts in this tragedy about unrequited love. The lead male character is a foundling, brought to Wuthering Heights by the erstwhile Bible-thumping Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton), owner of the eponymous remote farm located in northern England near windswept, mystic moors. Although Heathcliff’s color is much remarked upon (especially by Cathy’s older brother, the harebrained Hindley, roguishly played by Lee Shaw), his precise ethnic origins are never fully explained. Although if I heard correctly, at one point he’s referred to as a “Lascar,” which -- if that’s the case -- would make Heathcliff from India or another country east of the Cape of Good Hope at South Africa. However, I do think this Heathcliff is meant to be of indeterminate African ancestry.

Be that as it may (or may not), his dark skin complicates matters greatly and amplifies why he is “unworthy” of being loved by Cathy. Heathcliff grows up in close quarters with Cathy, portrayed as a young female of indeterminate age(s) by newcomer Shannon Beer, then as an adult by Kaya Scodelario, both of them apparently Caucasian British actresses. Living a hard scrabble existence at the farm, she and Heathcliff romp on the moors -- away from civilization’s restraints -- together, sleep in the same room and develop deep bonds for one another, unhindered and unimpeded by the taboo of incest (unlike Hindley, which may explain part of his brutish antipathy towards Heathcliff, who unlike him, is free of that social constraint).

As Heathcliff and Cathy mature he is deemed to be her social inferior (not least of all because he’s like, you know, black) and they are torn asunder, becoming arguably the most star-crossed lovers in English literature. The wild child becomes a “lady” and marries properly, at least according to 19^thcentury stuffy status conscious British standards. Heathcliff doesn’t exactly sit still for it as he is shunned because he started out life as a mere servant, a stable boy, who in this retelling is black.

Before Sigmund Freud evolved his scientific theory of the id versus superego, the Brontë Sisters did so on the artistic level in their Gothic classics. Heathen Heathcliff represents the unbridled id, the unrestrained instinctual self. Cathy’s id is at war with her superego, the constraints and inhibition imposed upon her by society. As aboriginal heathenism clashes with Christian original sin, their saga encapsulates what Freud would later call “civilization and its discontents” in a scientific book of that title written only a mere 82 years after Em wrote her epistle.

At the heart of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is the thwarting of sexuality. It remains open to speculation as to whether the very youthful Heathcliff and Cathy indulge in actual sex play, or if they never ever act on their sexual impulses, including even kissing, until adulthood (and when it is too late). Take your pick; it’s subject to intepretation. In any case, 165 years after Emily’s classic was published, one would hope that the notion of sexual repression would by now be an extinct “Brontë-saurus.” Alas, the brouhaha surrounding birth control, “legitimate rape,” and so on -- that actually began during this election cycle with Obama’s refusal to allow “underaged” females over the counter access to so-called “Plan B” morning after pills -- proves that those puritanical dinosaurs still trod the Earth.

The supernatural angle of Emily’s novel and the 1939 classic film is played down in Arnold’s film. Emily’s literary device of a character named “Lockwood” demanding that Nelly (Simone Jackson) relate the saga of Heathcliff and Cathy is not used in this adaptation, which is largely told from Heathcliff’s point of view. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s moors, shot on location in the Yorkshire Dales, are appropriately moody. (BTW, of the eight Oscars Wyler’s 1939 version was nominated for, the sole Academy Award it won was for the cinematography by the immortal Gregg Toland, who in the next couple of years went on to lens John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.) Ryan’s close-ups of flora and fauna are also very elemental, rooting 19^th century humans firmly in the Earth, as much a part of nature as the insects, beasts and plant life of their very rustic surroundings. However, there’s one too many a close-up a la early D.W. Griffith of a caged canary, an all too obvious metaphor of poor Cathy, who palpably yearns to fuck the daylights out of poor Hetahcliff but is restrained Mr. Linton (Oliver Milburn) and the other trappings of the civilized self. Hail Britannia!

Beer is flat and not particularly appealing as the child/early teen Cathy. Scodelario is more attractive but sometimes stagey as grownup, sexually frustrated Cathy, the epitome of the conflicted, divided self. However, both Glave and Howson as the younger and more mature Heathcliff, always strike the right note, from snarling to defiance to howling at the moon. Sex, after all, cannot be denied, when all is said and done (and undone). Even -- perhaps especially -- in regards to forbidden love.