Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label The Great Gatsby

'The Great Gatsby' Offers Glitzy Visuals But Nothing Else - ABC News (blog)

By David Blaustein@blaustein May 10, 2013 5:00am Warner Bros. Pictures/AP Based on the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel of the same name, 'The Great Gatsby' casts Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway '� and already Baz Luhrmann's film is at a deficit. Maguire, impressive and perfectly cast throughout most of his fantastic career, gets lost in Luhrmann's eye-popping, era-melding, grandiose narrative. It's odd, because Maguire's mere presence '� his big, expressive eyes, his slight, everyman vulnerable physicality '� almost always elicits empathy before he even opens his mouth. It's not working here. When we meet Nick, he's not well. He's in therapy trying to deal with an experience that has changed his life, though it's not clear whether he's been institutionalized or is just being treated by a doctor in a building that's now the cinematic visual cliché of a mental institution. We learn some things about Mr. Carraway: he c...