Critical Analysis Of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby?

Picture sparkling flapper dresses, dazzling jewels, indulgent luxuries, booming hip-hop music, and showy personalities. Australian film director Baz Luhrmann recreates the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby (2013), molding the novel into a film that intoxicatingly pulls the viewer in with contemporary melodies and intriguing characters. With a production budget of a little over $100 million, the film brought in $129 million domestically despite critical reviews that disapproved of Luhrmann’s over-the-top sets and needlessly flashy scenes (McClintock 1). Baz’s films tend to feature dizzying camera angles and flamboyant acting, like in his Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! When Luhrmann applied his unique style to The Great Gatsby, critics despised

Ubiquitous in The Great Gatsby is the idea that our perceptions impair our understanding of reality and limit how we view others. As English Professor Paul Giles points out, the novel paradoxically “shifts between two views of Gatsby, portraying him as both a corrupt bootlegger … and a grand visionary” (3). This analysis of the novel still relates to the film because Baz relies upon and stays true to the book’s plot. Luhrmann highlights this idea of characters seeming one way on the surface but an opposite way on the inside, which extends Giles’ observations of the storyline’s play on perception. Continuing such incongruity, Daisy refrains from expressing her worries during this seemingly joyful scene. She is unable to say what she thinks, so Luhrmann articulates her insecurities through the words of “Young and Beautiful.” Baz notices that personas in The Great Gatsby have a duality of self, in which the vulnerable interior is hidden so that only the confident exterior is shown. This scene is representative of the duality found in Gatsby’s plot, which contains irony that Luhrmann underscores throughout the movie and most noticeably exploits through the soundtrack. Daisy needs “Young and Beautiful” to voice her inner emotions because she is afraid to expose her true identity. She therefore strives to retain strict control over her body so that no one senses her dissatisfaction with reality. Bottling her unease seems better than recognizing the hurt that would come from accepting and responding to reality, like her cold reality of an unfaithful husband. To survive in her dismal surroundings, Daisy ensures that her body shows nothing of the lingering doubts or troubling anxieties hinted at by Lana Del Rey’s song. Until the scene’s very end, Daisy’s charming face is all smiles. She abandons herself in awed