What’s Left to Say? Four Fitzgerald Scholars on Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby by T. Austin Graham, Caleb Smith, John Irwin & Wai Chee Dimock

What’s Left to Say? Four Fitzgerald Scholars on Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby by T. Austin Graham, Caleb Smith, John Irwin & Wai Chee Dimock

THAT’S WHAT NICK SAYS, at the end of the party in Tom Buchanan’s New York apartment. The words are Baz Luhrmann’s, not Fitzgerald’s. In the novel Nick has hated the party, hated Tom’s shameless flaunting of his affair, and the callowness of the assembled friends. The evening has wound up with Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose when she dares to say Daisy’s name, a scene Fitzgerald handles with crisp disdain, with Myrtle’s exact words and then the bloody towels on the floor all duly recorded. In the film, the bloody towels are gone; Tom’s blow to Myrtle is indexed almost in passing. What’s front and center is jazz music overlaid with Jay-Z’s rap soundtrack, exploding with the kaleidoscopic colors of the bacchanalian scene, and, of course, the stunning visual effect of the lit-up apartment windows across the street, their interiors opening up magically one by one and rising out of the façade, with the help of the 3-D technology.

Nick’s jab at the Yale club comes in the midst of all of this (he and Tom are going there for lunch before the latter decides on a whim to go see Myrtle). Luhrmann has not entirely made it up: in the novel, in the following chapter, Nick does indeed say of his dinner at the Yale Club that “for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day.” And the Yale Club has played an even unhappier role in a short story written just one year earlier, “The Rich Boy” (1924). Fitzgerald, of course, had gone to Princeton, so the targeted school is both a private joke and a need-I-say-more shorthand, the better to make short work of Tom Buchanan, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven.”

Luhrmann’s Tom is not made short work of. Superbly played by the Australian actor Joel Edgerton, this Tom is so raw emotionally, so visibly on edge, and so sensitive to slights and hurts that we almost forget that, yes, he is indeed one of the richest men in America, a racist and a bully. He has more in common with Gatsby than we think, a point dramatized by their remarkably similar behavior while at the wheel of that yellow Rolls-Royce. He is an in insider who has never been able to internalize that state, perhaps because it is not anyone’s to internalize in this movie. It is not just Nick, and not just Gatsby, who is perched, voyeuristically and revealingly, both within and without. That revealing voyeurism is Tom’s as well: even as he obsessively watches others, that very process subjects him to the camera’s recessional probe, pulling up dimensions of vulnerability and exposing them to view, over and over again.

Luhrmann lingers long over that process (unlike the slender novel, the film is 2 hours and 23 minutes), and with more tenderness than one would think possible. He is probably the only director who would tell this jazz age story this way, with this particular distribution of emotional charge. The film was made in Australia; along with Joel Edgerton there are two other Australian actors in lead roles (Elizabeth Debecki as Jordan Baker and Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson). Luhrmann had planned on shooting in New York, but was lured back to Sydney by a 40 percent “producer offset” offered by Screen Australia, a federal agency. The location and the cast were fine for him — he had always conceived of jazz as a phenomenon as significant outside the United States as within. His previous film, Australia (2008), also had a jazz soundtrack, performed by the Ralph Pyle big band, with clarinet solos by Andy Firth. It somehow made sense — that jazz should be the baseline, the sonic horizon and outer limit, for a movie by an Australian director, by this Australian director.

Baz Luhrmann was born Mark Anthony Luhrmann and raised in Herons Creek, New South Wales, a town with 11 houses; his father ran a gas station. Over the years he has more or less remade himself (like Gatsby, he changed his name), but Herons Creek has not completely receded either. And, from the standpoint of Herons Creek, every emanation from the Jazz Age, from 1920s America, has got to be unimaginably fascinating, to be gleaned only through visual hyperboles, through a surfeit of signs. Gatsby epitomizes this. But Tom Buchanan belongs there too. And so, too, do those gathered in that New York apartment. Maybe even the Yale Club itself. The over-the-top, surreal realism of the carnival is a tribute to each of these, each the stuff dreams are made of.

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