Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal criticized the film as “a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.” Morgenstern felt the elaborate production designs were a misfire.
He likened the film’s flaws to the decadent era which Fitzgerald criticized in his writing and stated that what is “intractably wrong with the film is that there’s no reality to heighten; it’s a spectacle in search of a soul”.
The Chicago Reader review felt “Luhrmann is exactly the wrong person to adapt such a delicately rendered story, and his 3D feature plays like a ghastly Roaring 20s blowout at a sorority house”. In The Atlantic, Christopher Orr observed that “the problem is that when the movie is entertaining it’s not Gatsby, and when it’s Gatsby it’s not entertaining.”
The positive reviews included A. O. Scott of The New York Times, who felt the adaptation was “a lot of fun” and “less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence”.
Scott advised “the best way to enjoy the film is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you”. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe reserved special praise for DiCaprio’s performance, saying “magnificent is the only word to describe this performance—the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman”.
The Scene Magazine gave the movie a “B−” rating, and praised the actors’ performances, in particular saying that “the stand-out actor is Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan doing an excellent job of showing the character’s gruffness, despite the one-dimensionality given to him”. A granddaughter of Fitzgerald, Eleanor Lanahan, praised the style and music of the film.
Tobey Maguire’s role as Nick received mixed reviews from critics, with Philip French of The Guardian calling him “miscast or misdirected”. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that “Tobey Maguire is his usual recessive presence, barely registering as either a dynamic part of the events he describes or their watchful witness”, and Elizabeth Weitzman of The New York Daily News opined that, despite “the wry-observational skills needed for Nick’s Midwestern decency”, the character is “directed toward a wide-eyed, one-note performance”. Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail was more positive of Maguire’s character, saying “our narrator, is prone to his occasionally purple rhetoric. But that imposed conceit, the image of a talented depressive writing from inside the bauble of his imagination, seems to validate his inflated prose and, better yet, lets us re-appreciate its inherent poetry”.
