![]() ![]() “There’s no dancing around Woody’s usual ‘what is it about older guys that’s so appealing to women?’ schtick, but there’s little arguing with the melancholy charge of his New York, especially when shot through car windscreens by Vittorio Storaro, who alternates the honeyed-glow of an embarrassed sun with the reflective silvers of a persistent, lyrical deluge. ![]() “Gomez’s twist on Phoebe from The Catcher in the Rye provides the film’s level-headed emotional center and its romantic payoff, while Cherry Jones’ as Chalamet’s mother-with-a-secret brings us squarely into Fitzgerald territory come the final, recriminatory scenes. Gatsby’s self-indulgent journey appropriates scenes from Salinger wholsesale, but he’s afforded a beautifully tender moment at the piano, gently crooning his way through ‘Everything Happens to Me’ - more Chet Baker than Frank Sinatra. “Chalamet is equally impressive as he bites into the ends of Woody’s prose. “Fanning brings most of the funny,” says Thrift, adding that she “brings to mind Mira Sorvino’s Oscar-winning turn in Mighty Aphrodite, her ‘sexually conflicted’ hiccups and desperate-to-impress guilelessness stealing a series of comic set-pieces from her older cast members. Meanwhile Pollard, his writer ( Jude Law) and star ( Diego Luna) make passes at the naive 21-year-old Ashleigh,” who’s a bit of a “ Daisy Buchanan proxy.” Before the WASP program started, Fort witnessed from the air the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, while she was conducting civilian flight instruction. Cornelia Fort was the first WASP to die while on active duty in the US military. Gatsby is roped in to kiss Shannon on-camera just as the heavens open. Plutocrats are political decision-makers who create public policies that directly provide an advantage to those with vast incomes. Some WASPs did lose their lives in service to their country. “As Ashleigh arrives at an upmarket hotel to interview Liev Schrieber’s helmer, Gatsby bumps into Shannon (Gomez), the younger sister of an old flame, on a student film shoot. “His girlfriend Ashleigh (Fanning) is travelling to New York to interview filmmaker Roland Pollard (‘Up there with Renoir and De Sica…lots of emotional probing, never a decent toilet joke’) for the college paper, and Gatsby, ‘a wannabe Sky Masterson,’ has promised to show her the sights, flush with cash following a poker game. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrative comes fully to bear on the film’s final act, with Gatsby more equatable with the ‘hostile rebellion’ of J.D. His moniker makes for something of a red herring, even if F. “Chalamet plays Gatsby Welles, student at upstate Yardley college and scion of ‘a farrago of WASP plutocrats’ whose autumn bash he’s desperate to avoid.
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