Klaes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki in THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
In the neo-noir The Burnt Orange Heresy, a shady art critic (Klaes Bang) picks up an adventuresome hottie (Elizabeth Debicki) and is enlisted by a menacing zillionaire (Mick Jagger) to scheme out a painting from a reclusive painter (Donald Sutherland). This being a neo-noir, things don’t go as the critic has planned and it takes him too long to realize that he is the sap in the story.
Klaes Bang (The Square) is just made to play that handsome charmer who is just Up To No Good, the kind of role that would have gone to Zachary Scott in the 1940s. But in The Burnt Orange Heresy, Debicki, Sutherland and Jagger are each so compelling, and their characters are so rich, that they completely overshadow Bang’s critic.
This is also a very talky movie, too much so. All the yakking and Bang’s unrelatability drag down The Burnt Orange Heresy and keep it from engaging the audience. relatibility
Sutherland has such a sparkle as the mischievous painter, and it may be easier to spot it now in the aged actor than forty years ago in MASH or Animal House.
Mick Jagger in THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY
The real surprise here is Mick Jagger. This character, a rich and utterly masterful string-puller, is well within Jagger’s acting range and he nails it. After all, as an actor in fictional narratives, he is best known for two of the very worst movies of 1970: Ned Kelly and Performance. But here, Jagger employs his unmatched worldliness to inform this performance (and he makes great use of his trademark sneer and predatory smile, too). Jagger and Sutherland are probably the two best reasons to see this movie.
I saw The Burnt Orange Heresy at Cinequest. I expect it to be released theatrically in the Bay Area in the next few weeks.
Carey Mulligan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in THE GREAT GATSBY
Let’s start with director Baz Luhrman’s decision to present The Great Gatsby in 3D. The source material, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, is so compelling because it is character driven. Luhrman’s 3D cannot enhance the characters, but can only augment wild car chases and zooming camera shots that zip us down skyscrapers and across bays. So to use Gatsby as an excuse to launch some action sequences really misses the point of the story. See The Movie Gourmet’s Ten Really Bad Movie Ideas.
Indeed, there’s lots of eye candy in Luhrman’s Gatsby, but to what effect? The story seems set, not in the 1920s, but in a modern 1920s theme park where tourists waddle around chomping on churros while peering at flappers and Duesenbergs.
The story is about the Coolest Man in the World, the impenetrable Jay Gatsby, whose savoir faire, personal mystery and lifestyle splendor completely seduce his neighbor Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator. Now you would think that putting Leonard DiCaprio in impeccably styled white and pastel pink suits would take you a long way toward Cool. But this Gatsby is a little too anxious. And the screenplay dumbs down the story, and we learn too much about Gatsby’s real past too early and too easily. Similarly, Tobey Maguire as Carraway brings a yippy dog energy to a character that should be more observant (like Sam Waterston’s laconic Nick in the 1974 Gatsby).
Gatsby, the acme of the self-made, is driven to at long last possess Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the girl who got away (and who is now married to the boorish jock Tom Buchanan). The novel deeply explores Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy. Can someone with New Money penetrate the Old Money set? Did Daisy really love Gatsby when they were younger, or was he just a girlish flirtation? Does Daisy love Gatsby now, or is she just flattered by his captivation and impressed by his bling? Can Daisy escape her class? Can Gatsby’s success buy him everything that he needs and wants?
Sadly, Luhrman reduces The Great Gatsby into a sappy melodrama of obsessive love. That’s kind of like turning The Sun Also Rises into a bullfight story or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a river raft travelogue. It doesn’t help that Carey Mulligan’s Daisy is more neurotic than fickle – and just not that sexually fascinating to begin with.
The one good thing about this movie is Elizabeth Debicki’s turn as the celebrity golfer and jaded party girl Jordan Baker – her every glance commands the screen.
Luhrman made lots of other choices in this adaptation. Some work out (to my surprise, I didn’t mind the 21st century music) and some don’t (the odd and nakedly commercial casting of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim). But the resulting totality is a hollow, somewhat vulgar misfire. It’s the flashiest version of The Great Gatsby, but strangely not even as vivid as the written word.
In the novel, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are “careless” people – their Old Money has insulated them from the consequences of their selfishness and irresponsibility. Fitzgerald describes them thus:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
The Great Gatsby is almost 2 1/2 hours long. That means about four hours of your life, if you count driving to the theater, parking, buying popcorn beforehand and returning home afterward. The novel is only 192 pages, so I strongly suggest that you take the four hours and read the glorious book instead.
