Director Baz Luhrmann finds a suitable subject for the riotous excess of his directorial style in the riotous excess of the Jazz Age. By the time the onscreen parties lurch to a halt, you may feel a little buzzed yourself. Unfortunately, there's still rather a lot of movie remaining at that point, and the denouement stretches out like a nasty morning after. Luhrmann mostly stays faithful to F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous story of American self-invention and money-based morality, but only mostly. In stressing Gatsby's material greatness, he forgets the parts that make the poor suitor from the Midwest romantic, admirable, tragic, or even touching. We're left with an obsessive, deceptive little crook who is so bent on subjecting the Girl He Couldn’t Afford to his own gargantuan self-love that he demands she rewrite her own past for his sake. Ungreat. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton. (2013) — Matthew Lickona
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