The Great Gatsby

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Nick Carraway narrates from a sanitarium after a summer that left him disillusioned, recalling his arrival on Long Island in 1922. He rents a small house in West Egg beside the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a man whose parties draw crowds from across the bay. Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan lives with her husband Tom in fashionable East Egg, and Nick visits them with golfer Jordan Baker. The water, lawns and roads make the characters seem close, while class and money keep them apart.

Gatsby’s parties turn his home into a spectacle of music, dancing, guests and excess, but he remains strangely separate from the crowd. Nick eventually meets him and learns that the social display has a private purpose: Gatsby hopes to see Daisy again. Jordan explains they knew each other before the war and that Daisy married Tom while Gatsby was away. Gatsby persuades Nick to arrange a meeting at Nick’s cottage, where his composure breaks into nervousness before Daisy arrives. The reunion is awkward, then gradually warms as they remember their former intimacy.

Gatsby’s wealth and carefully managed persona are bound up with his effort to reclaim Daisy. He takes her and Nick through his mansion, displaying shirts, rooms and luxuries as if material proof can bridge the years between them. Nick’s narration reveals the history Gatsby has concealed: he was born James Gatz and reinvented himself, eventually becoming rich through criminal associates such as Meyer Wolfsheim. The opulence makes his reinvention visible, but leaves a gap between the young man’s original dream and the grand identity built around it.

Tom recognizes the affair and investigates Gatsby’s background, while Daisy’s marriage becomes the center of a conflict that moves from private rooms into public confrontation. On a hot day, the group drives to Manhattan and gathers at the Plaza Hotel. Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal connections and insists Daisy will not leave him. Gatsby wants her to say she never loved Tom, but Daisy cannot erase her life with him. The confrontation leaves Gatsby’s dream intact only in the narrowest sense: he believes the past can be restored even as Daisy retreats toward status and security.

On the return drive, Daisy is at the wheel of Gatsby’s car when Myrtle Wilson runs into the road and is killed. Myrtle is George Wilson’s wife and Tom’s mistress; she mistakes the approaching car for Tom’s and runs towards it. George is devastated. Gatsby tells Nick that he will take responsibility for the accident, though Daisy was driving. Tom directs George toward Gatsby, and George reaches the mansion and shoots Gatsby before killing himself. Nick discovers the body and becomes the person left to manage the consequences of a spectacle that so many guests enjoyed.

Gatsby waits for Daisy to telephone, remaining convinced that she only needs time. When the phone rings beside his pool, he believes the hoped-for reply has arrived, but Nick is actually calling. George shoots Gatsby and then himself. Nick hears the shots and becomes the person left to arrange a funeral that the party crowds and the Buchanans do not attend. The press presents Gatsby as the cause of the tragedy, while Nick knows who was driving and how readily Tom directed suspicion elsewhere. He walks through the deserted mansion before leaving New York. In the sanitarium that frames the film, completing the manuscript becomes a way to preserve Gatsby’s hope alongside the damage his pursuit could not prevent.

Luhrmann stages the story as an intensely stylized period world, with fast movement between crowded parties and quiet pauses that isolate Gatsby. Bold color, modern musical textures, 3D spectacle and art-deco interiors translate Nick’s narration into a heightened recollection rather than a neutral historical panorama. Catherine Martin’s design contrasts Gatsby’s mansion with Nick’s cottage and the ash-filled Valley of Ashes. These places make visible the gap between inherited privilege, newly acquired wealth and the people harmed along the route connecting them.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby shifts between practiced hospitality and the nervous young man visible during the reunion. The confidence he can perform for strangers becomes fragile when Daisy might judge whether it was worth acquiring. Carey Mulligan lets Daisy respond to the splendour and the remembered affection without making either response a clear commitment to abandon her marriage. Joel Edgerton’s Tom relies on a different assurance, interrupting other people and asserting a status he has never had to invent. Tobey Maguire’s Nick watches these performances while repeatedly becoming involved in them. He provides the cottage for the reunion, accompanies the trip to Manhattan and eventually knows more about the accident than the public account reveals. Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce make that involvement part of the narration’s difficulty: Nick cannot explain the summer as if he stood entirely outside it. The recurring green light across the bay gives Gatsby’s wish a visible destination, but seeing it has never meant he can control what awaits him there. The film’s extravagant movement repeatedly pauses around that distance, allowing the size of his possessions to coexist with the narrowness of the answer he wants.