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" The reviews of the heavily-hyped, practically pre-panned The Great Gatsby have begun to roll out, and many, though not all, are saying exactly what was expected: that director Baz Luhrmann has desecrated (Baz-tardized?) F. Scott Fitzgerald&amp;#039;s masterwork about the elusive American dream. &amp;quot;Luhrmann&amp;#039;s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he&amp;#039;s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste,&amp;quot; declares the New Yorker&amp;#039;s David Denby. &amp;quot;This is one of the most maddening examples of wasted money ever dumped on the screen,&amp;quot; writes an especially grumpy and hyperbolic Rex Reed. Time Out New York&amp;#039;s Keith Uhlich even dares to compare this version of Gatsby to \u2014 prepare to clutch your \u00FCber-expensive pearls, Daisy Buchanan \u2014 Twilight. It&amp;#039;s true that this Great Gatsby is not exactly worthy of the word great. But it&amp;#039;s also not quite the Jay G.-meets-Jay-Z train wreck many anticipated, either. Actually, despite one major change to the narrative structure, the film turns out to be a pretty faithful adaptation of the book, one that just happens to be in 3-D and peppered with some of Luhrmann&amp;#039;s now-standard filmmaking flourishes. And that&amp;#039;s the problem. After all the blog-comment handwringing about how the Man Behind the Red Curtain Trilogy would fling Fitzgerald&amp;#039;s subtle novel into a stratosphere several hundred miles north of over-the-top, the movie feels like a tepid letdown. Ironically, what Baz Luhrmann&amp;#039;s Great Gatsby really needs more of is Baz Luhrmann. Let me say upfront that I always thought Luhrmann was an ideal match for Gatsby. In his take on Romeo and Juliet as well as his brilliantly insane Moulin Rouge!, the so-called vulgarian turned decadence into something visceral and thrilling, telling love stories that effectively captured the adrenaline jolt of locking eyes with pretty young Capulets or crooning with courtesans atop massive, improbably bedazzled elephants. In that context, it made total sense for Baz to take on the daunting assignment of capturing Gatsby, the foremost conspicuous consumer in American literature and a man who knows full well that the greatest thing he&amp;#039;ll ever know is to love and be loved in return. Of course, purists say, rightly, that The Great Gatsby isn&amp;#039;t a celebration of all that wealth. But in order to understand what&amp;#039;s wrong with the desire to accumulate so much money and unnecessary real estate, one first must understand what&amp;#039;s seductive about it. And Luhrmann certainly knows how to depict the things that seduce us. In recent weeks, the more that friends and film-critic colleagues got freaked out by all the crazy Luhrmann might heap uponGatsby, the more excited I got: &amp;quot;This movie might contain can-can dancers doing the Charleston while Macklemore&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Thrift Shop&amp;#039; blasts on the soundtrack. Or Jay Gatsby introducing Nick Carraway to a gangster known only as The Maharaja. Or the sight of 3-D boats beating against a current that totally looks like it&amp;#039;s going to crash right into my face! Oh, it&amp;#039;s going to be a mess. A glorious, wonderful mess!&amp;quot; Once the Gatsby credits rolled, I was happily prepared to do the multiplex equivalent of a walk of shame. I would leave the theater feeling dizzy and still a little drunk, rubbing my over-stimulated eyes, thinking, &amp;quot;I guess that was a bad idea, but ... damn, it was kind of hot.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, once I actually saw Gatsby, I remained cinematically sober throughout. Yes, Luhrmann does in it what Luhrmann does: He gives us lavish Jazz Age soirees where corks pop and jazzed-up Beyonc\u00E9 songs thump. Thanks to his wife and collaborator Catherine Martin, he shows off sparkly costumes and luxurious sets. And he captures Leonardo DiCaprio \u2014 who, for the record, makes a far better Gatsby than Robert Redford did in the drowsy 1974 version \u2014 exploding with rage with almost the same ferocity he displayed in Romeo + Juliet. But somehow, none of it raises the pulse the same way that, say, the &amp;quot;Roxanne&amp;quot; sequence inMoulin Rouge! did a decade-plus ago. In Gatsby, it feels like Luhrmann is going through the motions, reigning in his tendency to fly some serious and surprising freak flags out of reverence for the sophisticated reserve of the source material. It makes me wonder if maybe Luhrmann might have been better off daring to do what he did in his aforementioned take on Shakespeare: set the movie in modern times. Imagine for a moment if the 2013 Great Gatsby had taken place in, say, 2006 or 2007, before the economy tanked. Jay Gatsby would still be a nouveau-riche man of mystery, but one who, perhaps, amassed his cash by flipping houses before the mortgage crisis hit. He&amp;#039;d still live on Long Island, where he&amp;#039;d throw massive, off-the-chain white parties featuring music that ... well, would probably sound a lot like the soundtrack to Lurhmann&amp;#039;s actual Great Gatsby. (&amp;quot;Always timeless ... Hove!&amp;quot;) He&amp;#039;d attempt to woo the posh wife of a total jerk who, instead of bemoaning the possibility of interracial unions, would regularly launch into unwelcome rants about the dangers of gay marriage. And in an ironic twist, Gatsby would meet his demise shortly before the 2008 economic collapse that would have sucked away all that Daisy-impressing wealth he so carefully cultivated. Would lovers of Fitzgerald&amp;#039;s prose have publicly shamed the filmmaker for daring to modernize the story in this way? Of course. But guess what? They were going to do that anyway. Ushering Fitzgerald into a more contemporary setting \u2014 something that Luhrmann caught very little heat for when he did it to Shakespeare, mainly because everyone does that to Shakespeare \u2014 might have been misguided. But at least it would have been truly bold and different, a way to open up the French doors in that suffocatingGatsby parlor and let in a much-needed fresh breeze. Instead, our Moulin maestro opted to slightly Luhrmannize a well-known story without really changing it much. As a result, he now seems a lot like Gatsby himself: a man standing at the end of a pier, reaching for a distant light the color of emerald-green absinthe and finding it just beyond his grasp. PLUS: Leo DiCaprio Cover Story and Exclusive DiCaprio Photos "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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