FILM IN REVIEW: GATSBY

1 8 9 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R ‘‘When I was at Bennington some of the English teachers who pretended an indi√erence to Hollywood or its producers really hated it. Hated it way down deep as a threat to their existence.’’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon ‘‘If anyone had told him these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.’’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise Some years ago during a tour of the Breakers, the Vanderbilt summer cottage overlooking the Atlantic in Newport, an eagleeyed woman in my group asked the tour guide why there were four taps in the bathtub. Because, the guide helpfully explained, the Vanderbilts, wishing to provide every amenity, gave their guests the option of hot- and cold-running ocean water in their baths. I’ve thought of those taps, Mammon’s triumph over Nature, whenever I’ve heard anyone complain that Baz Luhrmann’s new 3D version of The Great Gatsby is vulgar and showy and a desecration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. What could be more vulgar, 1 9 0 T A Y L O R Y more ostentatious than piping the Atlantic directly into your john? Gatsby’s riches, unlike the Vanderbilts’, are new money, and because of that he’s looked down on by those who have always been able to take their boodle for granted. But if Gatsby’s romantic dream doesn’t succeed, his extravagances suggest that he knew at least how to have fun with his money, and Luhrmann, alive to spectacle and showmanship, is an inspired adapter of his story. The movie does not proceed with the crafted precision of the novel. But that precision has led some people to assume that Fitzgerald’s subject is as refined as his method, as if Gatsby’s lavish summer-night frolics were conducted with the quiet of an Edith Wharton country-house weekend. Luhrmann’s Gatsby is, as A. O. Scott (one of the more astute critics to have written on the film) noted in The New York Times, like a whirling opera: it’s mad and messy and crazymaking and wonderful and finally haunting, and the disapproval it has provoked has revealed that people harbor some fascinating, wrongheaded fantasies about Fitzgerald’s novel. What Luhrmann understands in his bones is that excess mediated by good taste is a contradiction – is, actually, bad taste. That’s the kind of bad taste you see in the Breakers’ gilt and lavishness, in the ornamentation filtered through the boring refinement of old money. There’s something distinctly repressed in the Breakers’ attempt to be the American Versailles. Walking through it, you take in the décor and imagine that the carpets and furniture might have been manufactured to look faded when they were new, the better to impart that patina of dull respectability. What I remember best about the tour is the frigid cheerlessness of the cold unadorned bathroom surrounding that deluxe-tapped tub, the bare white tile without a splash of color, the absence of any design filigree. Where’s the fun in acting like a tinpot Neptune in a room made to look like an unwelcoming institution? It’s a short hop from believing that wealth is something you take in your stride, without boasting, to believing it’s something to be ashamed of. And in modern reactions to American literature dealing with the rich, we seem to have reached the point where the drab tastefulness of old-money propriety has dovetailed with the determination to apply contemporary notions of class and gender to novels written well before our time. It has become one F I L M I N R E V I E W 1 9 1 R thing to read about the wealthy characters in Henry James or William Dean Howells or Edith Wharton but something quite di√erent to approve of them. In a piece for The New Yorker – later, God help us, published in a Penguin compendium of Edith Wharton ’s New York novels...