Weekend Movies: The Great Gatsby

 
Leonardo DiCaprio welcomes you to the summer's most lavish party

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

"Gatsby. What Gatsby?"

Daisy asks with a rush of girlish 'it can't be!' alarm, her nerves far overpowering the tiny glimmer of hope you think you hear in her voice. Which is as sensible a reaction as anyone could have when hearing about the arrival of another Jay Gatsby in movie theaters. You don't mean THE GREAT GATSBY, do you?

The F Scott Fitzgerald classic is a tough book to crack for filmmakers, its power so tied to its gorgeous (slim) prose, its subtle and cynical evocations and condemnations of American wealth and unspoken caste system. Further complicating adaptations is that the story is subjectively narrated. It's all told by Nick Carraway and his is, despite blood ties to the wealthy, an outsider's point of view. It's an easy book to love but a difficult one to adapt. But Hollywood keeps trying once every thirty years or so. 

The story, if you are unfamiliar (though you won't want to admit that out loud) follows the attempts of the elusive mysterious extremely wealthy Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) to win back his lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan) who he abandoned many years earlier while penniless to seek his fortune. That sounds like something out of a fairy tale, but to the novel's credit Fitzgerald doesn't exactly take it at face value as a hero's journey; what's so heroic about vast sums of money used only for personal gain?

Gatsby buys up an estate in West Egg Long Island where he has a direct eyeline across the water to a similarly palatial home in East Egg where Daisy lives with her rich and shady husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) who is carrying on an affair with low class Myrtle (Isla Fisher) who lives above a gas station in "The Valley of Ashes" which director Baz Luhrmann stages like it's the 10th circle of hell. Gatsby throws decadent flashy parties hoping to lure Daisy in and seduces her cousin Nick (Tobey Maguire, our narrator) into helping him facilitate the reunion.

Which gets this party (aka movie) started AFTER THE JUMP...

A New Trailer for Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby' Has Arrived: VIDEO

A new trailer for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has hit the web today and features music  from Beyoncé x André 3000, Florence + The Machine, and a moody track from Lana Del Rey.

Check it out, AFTER THE JUMP...

Golden Globes Nominations Announced For 70th Annual Awards

Hollywood's awards season is officially underway, and the Hollywood Foreign Press joined the party by announcing its Golden Globe nominations for best picture, best actor, best actress and all the other categories among cinema and television's 2012 crop.

The biopic Lincoln garnered seven nominations, making it the leader. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained received five nominations, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Waltz against one another for best supporting actor, while Les Misérables has been nominated in three categories, including best supporting actress for Anne Hathaway (congrats, babe!) and best supporting for Hugh Jackman.

In the realm of television, Girls, Modern Family and the underrated Showtime series Episodes were nominated for best comedy, while Downton Abbey, The Newsroom and Breaking Bad are among the dramas singled out for consideration.

I've included the entire list AFTER THE JUMP.

Ellen DeGeneres Joins Winslet, DiCaprio with Role in 'Titanic 3-D': VIDEO

"Holy tugboats."

Ellen DeGeneres was in the original Titanic but her part ended up on the cutting room floor. It's been replaced for the rerelease Titanic 3-D, and Ellen previews a scene here.

Check it out, AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: "J Edgar" Interview, Dustin Lance Black's Cautionary Tale

Leonardo, Clint and "Historian" Dustin Lance Black on the J EDGAR set

NATHANIEL ROGERS
...would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

 
INTERVIEW
Last week we had a very brief chat with Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar winning screenwriter of Milk fame. After that historic success he had the opportunity to direct a picture (What's Wrong With Virginia?) and now he's back with a biographical screenplay for another famous director, Clint Eastwood. After brief introductions, we jumped right into the movie at hand and our conversation in full follows. Lance's sprawling screenplay for J EDGAR leaps back and forth across the decades to chart the entire professional life of the infamous FBI man J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) while perpetually glancing sideways at his notoriously intimate relationship with his right hand man Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). The movie is proving divisive but Oscar buzz, particularly for DiCaprio's baity lead performance in Best Actor, continues.

TOWLEROAD: This is your second feature film biopic of a famous gay American. Will we get a trilogy?

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: No, You know... no plans in the near future. I'm doing the 'Barefoot Bandit' story on Colton Harris-Moore and then Under the Banner of Heaven after that. So nope. But these two, for me, Milk and J. Edgar were sort of bookends in a way. One is a mirror of the other.

J Edgar being the more cautionary tale?

Yes. I think so [Laughs]. One of them had extraordinary political power. The other one was just trying to get a small piece of it. One came out of the closet and by doing so spread hope. The other one stayed in the closet and spread fear and insecurity.

There is some poetic justic here. J. Edgar Hoover was known for prying into people's personal lives and here you are investigating his. Were you nervous about doing so, given that some people get angry when others speculate about the sexuality of the famous and the deceased.  

Well people have been speculating about J. Edgar's sexuality for generations now. People have been saying 'Oh, he ran around in cocktail dresses!' That, to me, didn't ring true and in my research proved not to be true. But also in looking into his record as a heterosexual he failed miserably. And so it becomes quite clear when you look at what he did and didn't do that whether or not he ever consummated it, this was a guy who was not straight. 

CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP...

Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood Discuss Cross-dressing, 'Aggressive' Gay Kisses in 'J Edgar'

The Hollywood Reporter talks to Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood about the upcoming biopic J Edgar. Sounds as though they play the gay element right on the edge.

On the gay kiss:

Neither Eastwood nor DiCaprio has drawn any conclusions about Hoover sexuality.

"Whether he was gay remains to be seen," Eastwood says. "But [he and Clyde Tolson] were inseperable (sic) buddies. Was that becase he didn't trust anybody else or was it a love story? I think they had a great affection; whether it was gay or not, I don't know."

DiCaprio elaborates, "What you cannot doubt is that Clyde Tolson and he had a relationship that spanned most of their life; they lived with each other, had lunch and dinner, and [Hoover] left everything to Clyde. Unarguably, they were partners in some sense."

The film depicts Tolson aggressively kissing Hoover on the mouth at the end of their fistfight.

And the rumored cross-dressing:

"Along the way, people accused him of [that]," Eastwood notes. "But nobody knows how accurate it was. Evidently the woman who accused him of that, her husband had been sent to the slammer by Hoover. So you don't know how much was vengeance."

Eastwood himself believes "there is a certain amount of truth" to all the allegations, but wanted to retain some ambiguity. One scene in the film shows Hoover wearing his mother's dress.