I’ve come late to this, but the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby is striking. It is everything that you would expect of Luhrmann: sensational, self-conscious and hysterically camp. I doubt that anyone expected a literal interpretation from Luhrmann, but few can have anticipated this total re-imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved classic. The modern score, the cavernous nightclubs, the idiomatic speech — it’s more Gossip Girl than Gershwin.
Doubtless, there will be those who decry Luhrmann’s audacity. But the trailer suggests that he has remained faithful to the book’s core themes: the transience of prosperity, that money is simultaneously everything and nothing, the dangers of obsession and charisma, and the phoniness of most people — Gatsby is betrayed by more than just his habit of calling everyone and everything ‘sport’. If Luhrmann succeeds in emphasising the timelessness of those themes by placing them in a fantastic world that is recognisable as our own, then so be it — that seems to be the sole justification for rehashing such a well-worn story.
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