That’s what I heard everytime Leo DiCaprio said “old sport” in “The Great Gatsby.” DiCaprio struggled with his accent, which does seem to fit his character of a man struggling to reinvent himself.
Accent aside, he did an amazing job playing Jay Gatz. I keep thinking back to the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version of Gatsy. Redford played the role as a lofty romantic, somehow detached from the dirty business of making money. DiCaprio shows both sides of Gatsby: the thug and the dreamer. In his distorted value system, he could only win Daisy Buchanan’s love by being obscenely rich. Born poor, he believed he had to make a lot of money fast, by hooking up with shady characters and greedy investors.
He might have won Daisy over if he’d followed her wish to run off together, to get away from her society, and from the demands of his moneymaking empire. But her suggestion horrified him. Gatsby couldn’t, wouldn’t run away – he had to prove to her “people” that he was solid and reputable.
I discovered Fitzgerald when I was a swoony teenager. I wanted to be like his beautiful flappers. Their whirl of a social life was everything mine wasn’t. I loved their short fringed dresses and their short, bobbed hair. I loved how they shocked their elders; loved their wit and their heartless treatment of earnest young men. Unfortunatelty, as I got older, I was forced to see that Fitzgerald’s flappers didn’t age well. They had nervous breakdowns, for one thing. Or worse, like Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, they died in fires. So while his Jazz Age women were seductive, I couldn’t be the party girl I so loved to read about.
Watching Baz Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” was like being at the center of a wonderful, whirling, drug and alcohol-fueled party. It was an exhilarating, exhausting experience. But after the party comes the hangover. You know you’re getting older when instead of thinking about Daisy and Jay’s tragic love, you wonder who got Gatsby’s mansion when he died? The bank? Meyer Wolfshiem?
My reluctant cynicism may be a function of age, or the recent recession, which certainly affected me. Or maybe Luhrmann was successful in exposing the rot beneath the shining excess of our dreams.
I wished Luhrmann had scrapped the conceit of Nick Carroway writing “Gatsby.” The Nick in Fitzgerald’s book floats above the story, and it does make emotional sense to have him deeply affected by his friend’s death. But to have a kindly shrink advise him to write about it? And then to have those words swirling around the screen, like cartoon characters from “The Sorceror’s Apprentice?” It was as if Luhrmann didn’t quite trust his artistic vision, which is a powerful one that can stand on its own, without cute little homages to his source material.
