The sheer volume of movies available through theaters, home entertainment and services like Netflix can make it difficult to discern the good from the bad and the ugly in the world of cinema. Every so often, we here at NBNtertainment will be taking a major studio release and picking out an alternative film of a similar genre, theme or style for you to check out as a comparative primer.
Baz Luhrmann would seem to be the absolute worst directorial choice for adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal novel The Great Gatsby.
Luhrmann, a filmmaker from down under, is all about glitz and surface thrills. He’s the type of flashy but tasteless character that Nick Carraway would’ve taken his time harpooning in one of Fitzgerald’s breathlessly elegant passages.
And, yes, Luhrmann’s apparent travestying of Gatsby purportedly embellishes all that the book scoffs at. Though I haven’t actually seen the film yet, one only has to watch the trailer to be bombarded with ersatz CGI, whirlwinds of party debris and an anachronistic soundtrack of four-on-the-floor EDM so ill-suited to the Jazz Age that it’s almost comical (the likes of Fergie and Lana Del Rey are rearing their ugly heads). It seems as though a music video and a Brooks Brothers commercial got into a bad car wreck.
Thinking about films that do actually share more common themes with Gatsby, I kept returning to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), a divisive, testy film in its own right.
In his piece for The New Yorker, critic Anthony Late wrote of the film’s overarching theme: “The Master […] gives us so much to revere, starting with the image that opens the film and recurs right up to the end—the turbid, blue-white wake of a ship. There goes the past, receding and not always redeemable, and here comes the future, waiting to churn us up.”
That sentiment, a coda to his wonderfully written review, is untethered to associations with Fitzgerald’s prose, though it echoes the closing line of Gatsby in many ways: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The Master is colored by references cinematic and otherwise, and there are strong shades of Gatsby present. In the narrative, we follow Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a World War II veteran afflicted with severe PTSD, as he drifts, like Nick Carraway, across a rapidly shifting American climate and into the presence of a purportedly great, alluringly enigmatic figure.
That figure, the film’s Jay Gatsby, is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a demagogue as calculated and false as James Gatz’s alter ego. A lot of controversy surrounded the film in regards to Dodd’s character as he clearly resembles Scientology founder and science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and while the film certainly takes stabs at the faith, this is by no means a satire.
The core of interest here is vested instead in the inexplicable but incessantly fascinating relationship that develops between Quell and Dodd, each respectively embodying primitive, honest combativeness and calculated, fraudulent magnetism. Those expecting a clear explanation of why they put up with each other will be disappointed; Anderson’s script is opaque. But that focus on the relationship between two apparently opposite-minded men and the ways in which their differences reinforce each other’s ideas livens the film with a chemistry that rings distinctly of the Carraway-Gatsby relation.
What really sells the believability of Dodd and Quell’s love for each other are the actors, and I do not exaggerate when I say that Phoenix and Hoffman give two of the best performances of the decade thus far. If you watch the film for nothing else, watch it for them.
Also similar to Gatsby is The Master’s distillation of a distinct period of history. Instead of capturing the wild energy and shallow society of the Roaring Twenties, Anderson treats audiences to the vivid sights and sounds of '50s post-war America, as the economy began to boom but many men were left still restless in the wake of so much destruction.
The clunking, spooky score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, heightens the unease and is peppered with beautifully re-mastered cuts from artists of the decade like Jo Stafford and Ella Fitzgerald. The general aura and aesthetic of The Master becomes appealingly vintage yet its challenging, pop psychological narrative is unmistakably modern.
We are left with a work that is stylistically opposed to Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, yet one that also shares so much in common with that film’s source material. Both the literary Gatsby and Anderson's work are narratives mining at some greater truths about human relationships, and how the passage of time effects an era and its people.
What The Master then renders best is that sensation of “being borne back ceaselessly into the past”; time and technology may progress, but the bonds between men remain ever-mysterious.