Frontlines: The Great Gatsby

Over the past 40 years, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has arguably become the best-known American novel in the world, along with Gone With The Wind. The latter, though, has been helped by its lone movie treatment as much as Gatsby has been, so far, hurt by its movie versions. All that has changed. At long last, the Great American Novel has a Great American – well, Australian-American – Movie to translate it, and keep it good company.

Great music us at the heartof the film’s appeal. In the hands of director Baz Luhrmann, music producer Jay-Z, Craig Armstrong, and Bryan Ferry, Gatsby’s music is both jazz-age and contemporary. The two greatest hits come one from each era: there’s George Gershwin’s timeless ‘Rhapsody In Blue’, which plays as we meet Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), and – on the contemporary flipside – Jay-Z’s rollicking, raunchy ‘100$ Bill’, easily the pick of the new tracks. Other new songs written for the movie include Florence & The Machine’s ‘Over The Love’, a checklist of snippets from the novel; and the ‘Young & Beautiful’ theme music for Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), sung in a pretty, flutey voice by Lana Del Rey.
When it’s all over and the credits roll Sia’s ‘Kill & Run’ stands out; the title is James Bond, the sound is lounge. Full of low, open vowels drawled out in the Michael Stipe school of alternate phrasing, the lyrics are hard to make out in the film – except for the key refrain: “Kill and run, kill and run, I’m one, I’m one o’ the dirty guns/ Kill and run, kill and run, bullet through your heart.” As you listen, you see it again: a man, shot in the back in his own swimming-pool, reaching up to touch his dark bathing suit just over his heart, incredulity in his eyes as his fingers come away red.
It’s just one moment that stays with you in a film thatis at once powerful and memorable.

For a full, detailed review of The Great Gatsby, by Anne Margaret Daniel, see [link]hotpress.com/features/filmreviews/The-Great-Gatsby/9790859.html?new_layout=1[/link]