The Great Gatsby (2013)

Coming into 2013 I had a list of films that I thought had a real shot at being my favorite movie of the year. Because I haven't been able to get to theaters much, I've watched only Now You See Me, which I enjoyed but nowhere near as much as I hoped to. I haven't yet gotten to Stoker, The Grandmaster, Much Ado About Nothing, Pacific Rim, or The World's End, which appear to be the main contenders (barring a few dark horses like Only God Forgives or Europa Report). At this moment, my favorite film of 2013 is probably the Evil Dead remake, and while that's a fun little picture, if it ends the year at the top of the list 2013 will have been a desperate failure.
The one I was really looking forward to, the one I was sure would be my favorite, was Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. It was by far my most-anticipated movie of the year. I know that Luhrmann is known as a style-over-substance guy, but to be fair, I'm sometimes a style-over-substance guy myself. I loved his Romeo + Juliet when it came out, and I enjoyed Moulin Rouge, which is a bit of an accomplishment in itself because it's a movie I should have hated. Gatsby seems like the kind of story Luhrmann can tell maybe better than anyone else, but what really put it over the top for me was the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role. I've been saying for years that he was born to play Jay Gatsby, and he was finally getting his shot. Having Carey Mulligan, one of my favorite actresses, and Toby McGuire along for the ride was just icing on the cake.
I finally got to watch it last weekend, and I've been thinking about it a lot in the week since, trying to decide how I felt about it, and the principal feeling I keep coming back to is disappointment. It is nowhere near as good as it should have been.
DiCaprio is good, but I kind of had this feeling throughout the movie that he wasn't playing Jay Gatsby. Instead, he was playing Orson Welles playing Jay Gatsby. At his first moment at the party, where he shakes Nick's hand and the voiceover is talking about his smile, I thought, “That's Orson Welles' smile,” and DiCaprio never swayed me from that opinion. I couldn't really say it troubled me, but I was constantly aware of it.
Mulligan had to play Daisy, a thankless task. Daisy is one of the less likeable characters in American fiction, selfish and careless and shallow. Luhrmann and Mulligan seem to have decided to try to give her some warmth, and to an extent that works, but it ends up robbing her of any character. She seems to have no volition, no motivation. She's a charming and beautiful doll, no more capable of thought or complex feeling or making her own decisions than if her head were filled with straw.
Of course, to portray her this way, they had to take her completely out of the story after the death of Myrtle (Isla Fisher, who is somehow both under-served by the part and not very good in it). From that moment we never hear a complete line of dialog from her, just hints of phrases now and then, drowned out by ambient noise and other voices. We get no more closeups of her face, either. Luhrmann can't show her reaction, since she feels remorse neither for the crime itself nor for the fact that Gatsby took the blame for it and has been murdered because of it. He doesn't want us to see her as heartless, but the result is that she's just...blank. Gatsby's love for her is the single most important aspect of the story they're telling, and we never get why he loves her at all. How could anyone love her? Be charmed by her, sure. Fall for her briefly, of course; she's Carey Mulligan. But love her? Never.
Of course, the fact that Gatsby's love for her is the most important aspect of this story is in itself damning. This is supposed to be a story about class, about the cluelessness and casual cruelty of the wealthy, yet for some reason Luhrmann mostly ignores it. Sure, we see Tom (Joel Edgerton) treat a few “lesser” people as props and devices, but even that's mostly glossed over. During the confrontation in the hotel between Gatsby and Tom it finally comes out a bit, but it's still underdone and is, in any case, too little too late. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is a political work, an indictment of the wealthy, a statement on the inequality of American society. Luhrmann misses that whole text completely.
So what, though, right? We knew coming in that Luhrmann isn't a storyteller, and while it's clear that he doesn't have even a Cliff's Notes-level understanding of the story, the story isn't supposed to be the main thing. It's supposed to be visual, tactile. It's supposed to be about luxury, opulence, the decadence of the Roaring Twenties. For a style-over-substance guy, Long Island in 1922 is as obvious a setting as the fin-de-siècle Paris of Moulin Rouge.
So how does Luhrmann get the style so wrong? Well, principally, by not having real style. Almost all of the sets in this movie are computer-generated, and obviously so. In places that works, giving a dreamlike quality to the surroundings that the characters (who often blur into the backgrounds, so heavy-handed are the effects) move through, adding a layer of unreality to Gatsby's world which is, in fact, unreal. From a narrative standpoint that makes sense, then, but it still looks terrible. And during Myrtle's death scene it goes so far into the fantastic that I felt like I was watching the long-rumored Sin City sequel. It was literally cartoonish. I found myself starving for anything at all to look real, just for a minute.
Not everything about the movie was terrible, of course. There was actually quite a lot to like here. McGuire is exactly what Nick ought to be, and Edgerton is extremely strong (meaning, of course, extremely hateful) as Tom. Hell, DiCaprio and Mulligan weren't actually bad, they just weren't what I wanted. Unfortunately, none of the supporting cast distinguished themselves, except perhaps for Elizabeth Debicki. I was looking forward to seeing Adelaide Clemens again. I've been wanting to find out whether or not she can actually act since her not-great-but-better-than-the-film-deserved performance in Silent Hill Revelation. I'm still wondering. There just wasn't anything for her to do.
The score, which was my principal worry coming into the film, turned out okay. I still wish they had used period music from the most exciting period of American music, rather than Jay-Z's approximation of it, but the fact is that I like Jay-Z and he did a decent, though not outstanding, job here. The ballroom scenes were exactly the kind of excess I enjoy. The frame of Nick writing about the events of that summer from some time in the future, allowing Luhrmann to use some of Fitzgerald's excellent prose, works surprisingly well given that it doesn't make sense...everybody knows that Nick Calloway didn't write The Great Gatsby.
But overall I really feel let down. This is just such a tragic missed opportunity. Luhrmann had a great story with the perfect leads, and instead of using them he just masturbated for two and a half hours. Thirty minutes in I almost turned it off, and actually said out loud, “Man, I hate this movie.” As it went on it pulled me in to some extent, but I never shook that first impression.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The scene at the hotel. It's actually extremely well-done, with DiCaprio, Mulligan, and Edgerton all giving it everything they have. In context, though, it just reminds us of how great this movie might have been.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The endless CGI. Jesus, Baz, you've got plenty of money. Build a fucking set!

SCORE: 4/10. Perhaps that's unfairly low, but it's been years since I found a movie this disappointing. In a couple of years I'll go back to it, I suppose, and maybe I'll find things to like about it. I might even decide I like the movie overall. But right now, all I can feel about it is that tremendous disappointment. Someday, someone will make a proper movie from The Great Gatsby, and when that happens I'm sure I'll love it, but it won't have DiCaprio. It won't have Mulligan. It kind of breaks my heart.

In Bruges (2008)

I saw Martin McDonagh's second film, Seven Psychopaths, earlier this year and loved it, and have loved it more each time I've re-watched it since. So I've been kind of putting off watching this one, because it would have to be a disappointment; I was sure it would be obviously the first effort, the one where McDonagh made all the mistakes he would learn from before creating his masterpiece. I was totally wrong, though. McDonagh hit a home run first time out. I'm surprised but pleased to say that I think this is actually the better of the two films.
Of course, it helps when a young guy making his first picture is able to get Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Colin Farrell to star in it. That's got to smooth out the wrinkles somewhat, doesn't it? But regardless of the cast McDonagh has put together such a strong, thoughtful, well-told story here. I'm so impressed by it that I'm going to do something out of character for me: I'm going to issue a spoiler warning. If you haven't seen this go watch it (it's streaming on Netflix) and come back. For most films I really don't think it matters much, but this one you'll want to see without knowing too much about it first. And because it's the story that interests me, I'm gonna go into it in some detail.
So let's go. The basic story is pretty simple. Ken (Gleeson) and Ray (Farrell) are two hit men in the employ of Harry (Fiennes) who have been sent to Bruges to await further instructions. It eventually turns out that the reason they've been sent off is that their last job went bad, and Ray accidentally murdered a young boy. Ray thinks they're in Bruges to hide out. Ken thinks they're there on the next job. He's half right. Harry visited the city as a child, loved it, and sent them there so that Ray could have a nice time right before Harry orders Ken to kill him.
The main thing McDonagh had to do to make this film work is to get us on Ray's side. This isn't the first time an attempt has been made to make a child murderer sympathetic, of course. It's a challenge filmmakers have been setting for themselves since M, but McDonagh needs more than that. We can't just sympathize with Ray. We have to like him. So it's interesting that at the beginning of the movie we don't, or at least I didn't. He's whiny. He's rude. He's ungrateful, here in this beautiful city that he refuses to even try to enjoy. We're a half-hour into the movie before we learn what he's done, and another filmmaker would have used that time to seduce us. McDonagh doesn't even try to make Ray likeable 'til we know about the boy. That's pretty bold.
He comes alive when he meets Chloe (Clémence Poésy) and we learn that, when he's not being a big crybaby he's actually very charming, or at least a bit of a likeable nincompoop. Even when he's violent he's endearing, especially when he smacks down the annoying Canadian (Zeljko Ivanek); for a smoker that scene is pretty rewarding. Chloe makes us like him, in effect saves his character for us, so it's interesting that she's his undoing. If not for her, he wouldn't have hit the Canadian, and so wouldn't have gotten arrested on the train. Instead of making his escape, he's dragged back to Bruges, and back into danger. Furthermore, if not for Chloe he wouldn't have blinded Eiric (Jérémie Renier), and if Eiric hadn't wanted revenge Harry might not have found Ray anyway. It's not her fault, really; certainly she means him no harm, but the fact is that if he hadn't met her he would be safe somewhere else on the Continent, and Harry and Ken would have buried the hatchet. Happy ending.
That's the thing, though, isn't it? Should there be a happy ending? Because it sure feels like there's gonna be one. Ray and Chloe are happy together at the cafe, Harry and Ken have made up in the bell tower, and it feels like everything's gonna work out, and we're pleased with that because we've gotten so into Ray and Ken and what's going on with them that we've forgotten what the movie is actually about. Then Eiric calls up to Harry, he and Ken fight, and Harry shoots Ken in the neck. “I'm sorry, Ken,” he says, “but you can't kill a kid and expect to get away with it. You just can't.” Suddenly it all comes back to us. Do we want Ray to walk away? Just...run off with the beautiful girl and live happily ever after? Is that justice?
Well, is it? Society cries out for punishment, doesn't it? But me, personally, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of punishment. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the need to remove some people from the community; we're all better off when folks without conscience are taken off the streets. But Ray has a conscience. It's only Ken's intervention that prevents his suicide in the park. He knows that he deserves to die, says that he wants to, and it's only Ken and Chloe keeping him alive. If the only point is to make him suffer for what he's done, what can we do to him that will hurt him more than he's already hurting himself?
And yet, it's an open question whether Ray has learned any lesson, really. I think we can safely assume that he isn't gonna be a hitman anymore, but in the course of the film we see him assault the Canadian and his girlfriend and Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), as well as Eirik (to be fair, that one was self-defense). He may not want to kill, but he certainly hasn't lost his taste for violence.
That's what makes the scene where Harry comes for him at the hotel so gripping. Marie (Thekla Reuten, who has more than a touch of Juliette Binoche about her, of which I heartily approve) is blocking Harry from going upstairs after Ray, guessing that he won't hurt a pregnant woman. She's right, of course. But while they argue Ray creeps to the top of the stairs and takes aim at Harry, and the first time I saw this I was convinced that Ray would take the shot and accidentally kill Marie instead. It's a huge relief when he doesn't. Maybe he is learning.
On that note, I think it's instructive what happens when Jimmy is killed. Harry has just put a bunch of bullets into Ray. He's badly, perhaps mortally, wounded, but he crawls across the snowy cobblestones towards Jimmy's body. When Harry sees the body, he wrongly assumes he's killed a child himself, just as Ray did. So instead of delivering the coup de grace, Harry shoots himself. But, and here's the important point, Ray tries to stop him. With what might have been one of his last breaths, Ray tells Harry to wait, so that he can explain, but Harry just says "You've got to live by your principles" and kills himself.
Think about it: if Ray just keeps his mouth shut then the man who has shot him will die, and Ray will still have a slim chance to survive. If Ray tells him the truth, then he himself will die and Harry will go home to his wife and kids. Ray knows this, yet he still tries to tell Harry the truth. He is, in effect, attempting to sacrifice himself to save the man who has killed him. I think that's McDonagh telling us that Ray has learned, that he might somehow find a way to make amends, if he lives.
So that's what the movie comes down to, and why the ending is so good. We don't know whether Ray lives or dies. He needs to repay society for the damage he's done to it, and he seems to want to, and he clearly can't if he's dead or in prison. But like Harry says, can he kill a child and just walk away? Do we want him to live, or don't we? McDonagh leaves it up to us. All he has is questions. He offers no answers.
Farrell is very good as Ray. I especially like the scene where he finds Ken at the bar and explains how his date with Chloe went, and his mouth is running at three times normal speed because he's just done a gram of cocaine. I don't know how he delivered that dialog; it's like watching a great guitarist play a complicated piece of music, really. Fiennes is, as always, excellent. It's always good to see Ivanek, who is one of my guys. Poésy is very charming, though I did keep thinking of Melanie Laurent while I watched her. Still, watching her was a genuine pleasure. But the real star is Gleeson. He's one of my favorites; I love his face, the way you can see everything he's thinking right there in his eyes. You get so much out of him even when he's not talking. Like Fiennes, he's always excellent, and I think this might actually be the best work he's ever done. There are moments, like when he's telling Harry that he loves him, that make your breath catch. I'd watch him in anything.
And once again, I have to give a lot of credit to McDonagh. What a great debut film! It's not quite at the same level as Duncan Jones' Moon, but then, Jones' follow-up Source Code isn't as good as Seven Psychopaths, either. I hope to see a lot more from this guy, although the fact that he took four years between films, and the second one was about writer's block, makes me a little nervous. I hope this isn't all we're gonna get from him. Still, even if it is, he's done more with these two films than most writers or directors do in a whole career.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM:

The city itself. Having seen it in this film, Bruges is now the place to which I hope to retire. It's just gorgeous, and shockingly photogenic. Full props to the cinematographer (Eigil Bryld), but it's clear that he had a lot to work with.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The beginning isn't much fun. It becomes brilliant once Chloe is introduced, and we get the flashback to the boy's murder, but up until then it's both slow and aggravating. Even on a re-watch I find the first twenty minutes a bit hard to enjoy.

SCORE: 9/10. Very close to perfect (aside from those first twenty minutes). It raises questions that are worth discussing, and makes me wish I had seen it in theaters back in 2008 and then gone to the bar with friends afterwards to talk about it all night.

LISTS: Favorites of the Naughts, Top Ten of the 21st Century, My Top 100(ish).