The Great Gatsby sucks

[Hammock Parties]

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The trailers for this made it seem like the greatest thing EVER.

Now topping out at 42%

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_great_gatsby_2012/

Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.

The production is not insipid, let's give it that. An exercise in absurdist excess, this fourth screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, means to dramatize the excesses of the Jazz Age, with hints of Weimar decadence thrown in for bad measure.

But that's a banality by this late date, and it's as far as Mr. Luhrmann goes in making sense of the book. The film's only governing principle is maximalism—everything has been made as big as possible, apart from conversational interludes, when big feelings are displayed, like bullet points, by actors striking static poses.

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul. For all of its glittery fragmentation, "Moulin Rouge!" came around to moments of genuine passion. None of these new trappings means a thing because the people who populate them are stylish sticks, unsinged by the spark of life.

That's almost surely not the fault of the actors, for the director turns them into lifelike props. Mr. DiCaprio, who's no more comfortable with the phrase "old sport" than Robert Redford was in the previous version, is elaborately sincere when he isn't frowning like Jack Nicholson; being charming like, well, Leonardo DiCaprio, or being mysterious, except that people who are genuinely mysterious don't look mysterious. Carey Mulligan's Daisy is either languorous or amorous, not a lot in between. Mr. Maguire's Nick is cheerlessly impressionable. Joel Edgerton's Tom is charmlessly brutish. Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker is a flouncing cipher. And Mr. Luhrmann uses Amitabh Bachchan, a legendary star in his native India, to make the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem a leering pillowbiterin.

Given the lifelessness of the enterprise, there's little point in belaboring its failure to convey the novel's themes, let alone the emotional and social resonance of what has come to be considered a masterpiece of world literature. Although the hero created himself out of the whole cloth of romantic yearning, we see almost nothing of that self-creation, only the conflicted result. Although the Nick of the novel arrives at a new and tragic understanding of the American Dream, the Nick on screen can't be more than an earnest observer, since any vestige of the story's tragic sense has been replaced by melodramatic sadness.

This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby" while living on Long Island and in Europe. In a deviation from the book that amounts to a calumny against literary history, Nick, the author's surrogate, is discovered in a psychiatric hospital where, as an aging alcoholic, he struggles to comprehend the vanished figure at the center of the long-ago story, and finally completes his treatment by writing the novel. It's literature as therapy, and Gatsby as Rosebud.