The Great Gatsby (2013)

Something went fundamentally wrong with The Great Gatsby at the conceptual stage. Coming from Baz Luhrmann, it's no secret that the movie's loud, gaudy and overblown, a paean to self-indulgent excess. But Gatsby's a truly agonizing monstrosity, making Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet look like Separate Tables - or the '74 adaptation look like Citizen Kane. Imagine the worst music video ever stretched out to two-and-a-half hours, claiming to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Copy and paste plot summary: Stock broker Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) makes the acquaintance of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mysterious millionaire who throws swanky parties on Long Island but never attends himself. Through Nick, Gatsby reunites with his old flame Daisy (Carey Mulligan), trapped in an unhappy marriage with snobbish, unfaithful Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Tom gets suspicious, digging into Gatsby's past, dredging up ties to organized crime. Tragedy strikes when Tom's affair with lower class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) results in an accident.

The Great Gatsby starts dialed up to 11 and somehow gets more obnoxious. Luhrmann demolishes our senses with every cheap cinematic trick imaginable. There's caffeinated editing, swooping faux-camera work and laughable CGI, rendered in eye-exploding 3-D. There's text superimposed on the screen, sped-up photography intercut with gratuitous slow motion, sloppily inserted stock footage and incongruous hip hop music. Gatsby's parties are indescribably tacky: he first appears with Rhapsody in Blue blaring on the soundtrack as fireworks explode behind him, and that's the most subtle image. If Federico Fellini saw Gatsby, he'd advise Luhrmann to tone it down a notch.

Sadly, Luhrmann offers little beyond this sensory assault. For two acts there's nothing but exorbitant costumes, gauche art direction, gaudy exotic dancers, orgies and Beyonce tunes. And it drags on for a painful 143 minutes. There's no effort to make the story or characters credible: Nick's re-envisioned as a budding novelist, relating his story in flashback to a shrink (Jack Thompson). Gatsby and Daisy's connection becomes a tragic romance rather than a desperate fling. Did Luhrmann even read Fitzgerald? Source fidelity extends to plot points, some cribbed dialogue and the obvious symbols delivered with ice mallet subtlety. That damned eyeglasses billboard appears at least a dozen times, always in extreme close up. We get it already!

In the third act Gatsby transitions to dark drama. Here we get the meatiest scenes: Gatsby outlining his true back story, Tom confronting Gatsby, a tragic accident and subsequent murder. Unfortunately, Luhrmann pitches the human element at the same hysterical level. If the imagery and music feel comparatively restrained, the acting goes into frothing overdrive. Characters foam, scream, throw things and chew scenery. Even quiet moments are punctuated with affected gestures and pantomime posturing. But what did you expect? This movie thinks so little of its audience that it stops to explain who Kaiser Wilhelm was.

Leonardo DiCaprio tries, God bless him, to make Gatsby credible. He fails miserably. DiCaprio is just too bland, the character too poorly written to register. Tobey Maguire provides Nick an insufferable faux-naivety; his line readings make him sound mentally challenged, surely not the intent. Carey Mulligan (Drive) is more likeable than Mia Farrow but Joel Edgerton provides cringe-worthy cartoon villainy. Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Isla Fisher see their roles reduced to nothing. Jack Thompson (Breaker Morant) turns up for no reason.

I don't unconditionally hate Baz Luhrmann: heck, I enjoyed the much-derided Australia. His style's no less overwrought there, but wedded to a swooning epic romance it's enjoyable as pastiche. The Great Gatsby is nothing but crass vulgarity disguised as dizzying art. However appropriate that seems for Fitzgerald, in practice it's a catastrophe of Billy Jack proportions.