When too much spectacle is not enough : costume in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

On paper, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has all the makings of a great film. With its delicate story of hope, loss and the fading American Dream, its glamorous setting of wealth, celebrity and desire and its finely drawn, enigmatic characters, Fitzgerald’s novel offers grand themes all wrapped up in the trappings of popular appeal. A slim volume, it avoids the adaptation dilemma of most great fiction, i.e. too much complexity. And as an added bonus, in Nick Carraway producers are handed a trustworthy narrator whose insider/outsider status conveniently draws the audience in as both participant and informed observer. In reality, cinematic adaptations have been less than successful. The 1926 (silent) attempt (The Great Gatsby, Brenon, 1926) is lost save for a one-minute trailer, but apparently in its entirety the film so disappointed Fitzgerald and his wife that they walked out of the screening. Eliot Nugent’s 1949 version (The Great Gatsby, 1949) is a confused shambles with inexplicable departures from the original story and costuming choices that confuse genre and period. Better is Jack Clayton’s 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (The Great Gatsby, Clayton, 1974) which still lingers in my mind as a soft-focus Ralph Lauren advertisement, punctuated by elegiac scenes memorable for their aesthetic completeness, an image reinforced over the years by stills of Theoni V. Aldredge’s Oscar winning costumes. But there’s no denying that the film itself moves through the story like a rowboat through treacle.