Leonardo DiCaprio’s career may have just reached its apex, with his remarkable performance in The Revenant (2015) and subsequent Oscar win (finally!). However, his career includes a number of other impressive performances, ranging from playing a poor but charming young artist on RMS Titanic to a corporate spy who infiltrates the very dreams of his victims. On this star-studded resume, there are two films that stand out because of the remarkable similarity between the characters that Leo plays in them. In both The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Great Gatsby (2013), he dons the guise of a suave, good-looking millionaire who cheats his way to fortune from lowly beginnings, only to experience a precipitous fall from grace at the climax of the movie. One could even call The Wolf of Wall Street somewhat of a spiritual successor to The Great Gatsby; both stories are about the failings of the American dream, portrayed through the meteoric rise and abrupt downfall of the main character. Heck, the movies even came out only a little under 8 months apart from one another. But where the movies differ substantially is in their treatment of excess. In both movies this takes a primary role in the story, but The Wolf of Wall Street does an almost incomparably better job of portraying this extravagance. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which Baz Luhrmann missed the mark in his depiction of excess in The Great Gatsby.

I absolutely love the story of Gatsby, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original novel is one of my all-time favorites. I think Fitzgerald’s depiction of the failures of the American dream is one of the most hard-hitting and deeply relevant lessons we can learn in contemporary America, and his decision to portray this moral though the failures of Gatsby is absolutely brilliant both at a dramatic and rhetorical level. Because of how much I adore the story, I was incredibly nervous when I heard that Baz Luhrmann was going to be directing the movie adaptation. This is the guy who made a “modern” adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that used the original Shakespearean dialogue but couched it in a contemporary setting that featured car crashes, pool sex, and guns. That means that characters go around yelling “Put your swords up!” and people pull out their guns. You can’t make this stuff up. I can appreciate trying to adapt a movie to more modern times, but when you turn the epic duel between Romeo and Tybalt into this frankly confusing mess of a scene, I think you have to reconsider how effective your directing strategies are. The whole movie is just… unsettling. It’s so strange to watch characters act out a decidedly Shakespearean era story using Shakespeare’s own dialogue in a modern setting with modern tools and tropes. It really just doesn’t work – the morals of Shakespeare’s play don’t translate over because Luhrmann makes no attempt whatsoever to actually adapt the themes of Romeo and Juliet to contemporary society, instead making solely aesthetic or otherwise superficial changes. He’s trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

But despite my misgivings, I was still pretty excited for the movie. I liked the cast, and I was hoping that Luhrmann would have learned from his mistakes with Romeo and Juliet. Boy, was I wrong. As much I loved the book, this movie was honestly just painful to watch. It wasn’t all bad – Leo delivered a terrific acting performance, and the core of the story was still there, albeit diminished. But it was just so excruciating to watch The Great Gatsby fall prey to almost the exact same issues that had plagued Romeo and Juliet. Just like before, Luhrmann took a story that is defined by its setting (1920s America), and needlessly embellished it with a distinctly contemporary aesthetic elements. As one critic put it, “Luhrmann is exactly the wrong person to adapt such a delicately rendered story, and his 3D feature plays like a ghastly Roaring 20s blowout at a sorority house.” He robs Fitzgerald’s well-crafted writing of its trademark intricacy and replaces it with a poorly conceived façade of meaningless extravagance. But don’t just take my word for it. Here is a video showcasing the first party in The Great Gatsby – I would recommend watching it before continuing on with this essay.

Here is a corresponding section from Fitzgerald’s novel that describes the same party:

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners — and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

The movie’s depiction of the party is a hot mess compared to Fitzgerald’s colorful writing. There is no intricacy in Luhrmann’s scene, no complex layers representing the multitude of different experiences occurring under one roof, no room for anything but a single kind of display of excess. Every single thing on the screen is just so visually striking that at the end of the day, nothing “pops” out to the eye. It all just blurs together. When I watch the scene from 2:47 to 3:16 of the video, I’m struck by how little I recall of it afterwards. Really, all I remember is that there were a bunch of people dancing and then some streamers came down. Is that really what Fitzgerald’s magnum opus has been reduced to?

Fitzgerald’s description of the scene is so superior that even though there are no visuals provided, I feel that I have a much clearer vision of what is actually happening than after I watched Luhrmann’s scene. It’s complicated, it’s interesting, and it’s a patchwork of different experiences that are isolated and given the respect they deserve. The vast group of “single girls dancing individualistically” is contrasted with the “old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles” and the “superior couples holding each other tortuously.” In different corners of the garden there is a “tenor [singing] in Italian,” a “contralto [singing] in jazz,” and the “stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.” All of these images represent a kind of excess, but all are slightly different and they tell different stories about the people involved. They give the scene a kind of complexity that allows the image to expand into a grandiose scene that mixes and matches different people from different backgrounds who have all come to partake in the same vice – the pursuit of excess. This is what The Great Gatsby is all about. Gatsby’s parties provide a meeting ground for the multitudes of different egos and personalities to converge in one location in search of a singular ethos. It’s not about showing how people were assimilated into a flat or static mode of celebrating the culture of the Roaring 20s; rather, The Great Gatsby demonstrates how a vast number of unique people were able to converge in a complex and intricate manner, celebrating a very individualistic culture, and yet doing so communally.