Return of the Great Gatsby

Critics of Hollywood’s latest rendition of Fitzgerald Scott’s The Great Gatsby directed by Australian Baz Luhrmann and featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey McGuire, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton with a brief appearance by Amitabh Bachchan might have to eat their words yet. The film’s achievement, if not in Hollywood standard box office success, is exactly that which it is criticised for – its glitzy representation of the Roaring 20s exactly captures Fitzgerald Scott’s novel giving a crossover Broadway Moulin Rouge theatrical crossover over to the silver screen in a superb blend of theatrical forms to deliver a contemporary message of the dualism of corruptibility and idealism of the American Dream.
Precariously poised as it is on the fiscal cliff, America, as indeed Europe in the grip of its debt crisis, and indeed much of the developed world in its continuing spiral of economic depression, the new production resounds with the relevance of the social repercussions of mismanagement of economic excess to our times.    Kris Rampersad Website