Cinema: The Crack-Up

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It is also one of the few moments that survive the delirium of Clayton's staging. He shoots the love scenes in gauzy soft focus. Everything gleams: bracelets, sunlight on glasses, leaves on trees, even eyeballs. This is at best. At worst, when Clayton photographs the lovers dancing together in a vast, empty ballroom or kissing, their images reflected in a goldfish pond, he seems to have lapsed into some middle ground between self-parody and self-flagellation.

Clayton makes his most deadly error by transforming Gatsby into a dandified elegy. The novel was tough-minded, hard-edged in its social insights.

Clayton does take a shot at a little easy irony now and again — like using the song Ain't We Got Fun as counterpoint to the drawing-room tragedy. But he is as captivated by the bounties of wealth as Gatsby was, and spends endless minutes gliding his camera around expensive rooms or across the crowded floor of Gatsby's galas, all staged with a certain lavish clumsiness. This gives the film a numbing, punishing quality, as if everyone were trapped at some purgatorial party that will never end. At a running time of close to 2% hours, it frequently seems that indeed it will not.

The length just prolongs the film's al ready extravagant failures. "You can't repeat the past," Nick tells Gatsby, who disagrees. Nearly everything about The Great Gatsby, though, supports Nick. At least, no one here can.

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