The Great Gatsby. Director Baz Lourman, USA, 2013. In the roles of Leonardo Di Caprio, Toby Maguire, Cary Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and others.
The novel by American writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald was released in 1925. «The Great Gatsby» is considered the most famous book «the age of jazz», the decade between the end of the First World War and the Great Depression — an era in which the sense of the collapse of the pre-war world order was united, with a feverish desire for the immediate joys of practicalism at all costs. Cured in the form of a love story with a hidden mystery and a tragic ending, the Great Gatsby is in many ways a social study of the glitter and poverty of the «American dream» formed at that time, usually expressed in an unmistakable pursuit of material prosperity on the verge of the collapse of all hope.
The title of the novel is interpreted in two ways. It is believed that the definition of «Great» is given by the author, Gatsby, in an ironic sense: he, a man with great abilities and incredible life energy, has wasted himself in pursuit of wealth and empty, unworthy woman. On the other hand, the English word itself is many, and it is believed that Fitzgerald meant «great.» The Russian translation, however, had a first meaning.
The novel was first shielded in 1926 and then survived four more film versions. The last of these was filmed today by Australian director Baz Lourman. The legend says that after his phenomenal success, his film musical «Moulin Rouge» Lourman went «for reboot» on a journey along the Trans-Siberian Highway. During a long journey, he had an audio book called «The Great Gatsby», which led to the idea of filming the novel.
The ridiculous deaths in the painting follow one after another; the hero, whose green light at the marina is hardly imposed on the viewer in the painting, disappears from sight after the death of the hero. All that remains is a storyteller who accompanied Gatsby throughout the film, sweating him and all the other heroes. Is that what Scott Fitzgerald told us a hundred years ago? One can argue with that, but it is clear that the Lourman Base interpretation is no less convincing than the previous successful filming of 1974 and is clearly closer to today’s viewer.