The Great Gatsby: A slow wonder, this


The Great Gatsby
Starrring : Leonardo DiCaprio, Toby Maguire, Amitabh Bachchan
Rated: 8/10
Gatsby has had a long precedent in Hollywood. After author F Scott Fitzgerald sold the rights of his book for a paltry $16,000 after a frustrating run in Beverley Hills, there was a 1962 adaptation Tender Is the Night. It could not make it to the hit list. The 1974 mount starred Robert Redford but that too plummetted at the box office.
But now, the 2013 version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Toby Macguire in the lead, Fitzgerald’s finally got a blockbuster he had waited for all his life. And why not? After all, isn’t this the one calling itself ‘the great’ Gatsby?
For this gripping movie, you can entirely thank the intensity of DiCaprio on screen and the style of storytelling that director Buz Luhrmann unfolds. There is so much depth in the story that he needn’t have distracted viewers with that 3D thingie he has propelled for reasons best known to him.
But other than that, it’s an impeccable film that grows on you with a relentlessness with which DiCaprio pursues his love. It is a soiree of undying hope, of a strange kind of righteousness amid all the wrong-doing, a romance that rises like a phoenix despite its slow assent, and a visual treat that not many can capture the 1920s with.
No one could have portrayed so powerfully the hope and poignance that DiCaprio spills all over the screen, unveiling in the process, the chicanery of the rich and the famous. His best performance afterBenjamin Button and Aviator, but no less.
The only wasted character: Amitabh Bachchan. He needn’t and shouldn’t have accepted such a non-role. Really, He is Big B, for God’s sake!
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 19 May, 2013

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