this week in film and television

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER

The life and career of Sophie Tucker, seen here with longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, is celebrated in new documentary

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER (William Gazecki, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, July 24
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.sophietucker.com

It’s about time the story of Sophie Tucker gets told. Unfortunately, William Gazecki’s The Outrageous Sophie Tucker is not quite the telling we’ve been waiting for. “She is the most underrated jazz singer that ever lived,” Tony Bennett says in the documentary about the bigger-than-life Tucker. “She was a great jazz singer.” Born Sonya Kalish on Christmas Day in 1886, Tucker was determined to become a star, and she ended up leaving her mark in vaudeville, on radio and television, and in films as an actress, singer, and comedian. But mostly, the woman known affectionately as “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” was a major mensch, cavorting with presidents and fans, keeping track of almost everyone she ever met, doing her own promotion, and living life exactly as she wanted to. The Jewish, bisexual Tucker hobnobbed with world leaders, Al Capone, Ed Sullivan, and J. Edgar Hoover (who once asked her for one of her dresses), among many others, and saw her name in lights on theater marquees across the country. However, although the film features some wonderful archival audio and visual footage and photographs of Tucker — singing such songs as “My Yiddishe Momme,” “Some of These Days,” and “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl” and appearing in the films Broadway Melody of 1938 and Gay Love — it never really gets to the heart of who she was; instead, it’s more about producers Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who, after cashing out of a successful internet company, became obsessed with Tucker, meticulously cataloging her more than four hundred scrapbooks and beginning a biographical trilogy with I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir.

The Oscar-nominated Gazecki (WACO: The Rules of Engagement, Reckless Indifference) includes interviews with Bennett, Carol Channing, Michael Feinstein, Shecky Greene, Bruce Vilanch, and Barbara Walters (whose father hired Tucker to regularly play his Latin Quarter nightclub), and there are brief remembrances over the closing credits from Chubby Checker, Joe Franklin, Paul Anka, Connie Stevens, and lesser-known names, but everything else is seen through the eyes of the Eckers, making it feel more like a vanity project / overly personal labor of love than a comprehensive look at the great Tucker. And there’s just not enough film footage of Tucker in action; to make up for some of that lack, Gazecki uses animation to bring some of the photos to life, which is even sillier than it sounds. It’s still a blast learning about Tucker, watching her joke around with Jimmy Durante and her longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, following her unhappy relationship with her son, but this documentary barely brushes the surface of what appears to be a much bigger, far more exciting and fascinating story. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker opens July 24 at Cinema Village and will also have a three-day engagement at the JCC in Manhattan July 27-29 as part of the Cinematters series, with all four screenings followed by a Q&A with the film’s producers.

PHOENIX

Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) tries to recapture her past in Christian Petzold’s PHOENIX

PHOENIX (Christian Petzold, 2014)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, July 24
www.ifcfilms.com

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a mesmerizing noir set in 1945 Berlin, where an Auschwitz survivor tries to reestablish her identity, but going home turns into a strange, painful, and dangerous journey. Nina Hoss is riveting as Nelly Lenz, a nightclub singer who is the only member of her family to have made it out of the war alive. Reentering Germany from Switzerland, she seems like a ghost or a mummy, her face swathed in bandages after having been severely disfigured by a gunshot wound. Wealthy enough to afford special facial reconstruction surgery, she is offered the chance to look like anyone she wants; the doctor gently suggests an entirely new appearance would be best, but she defiantly demands her own face back. Cared for by a companion, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), a fellow Jew who helps Holocaust survivors and wants to move to Palestine with her, Nelly seems psychologically frozen, tentative and frightened of the future. Instead of looking forward, she decides to go back to her non-Jewish husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), now called Johannes. He has disowned his past so thoroughly that he doesn’t recognize Nelly as his wife, returned from the concentration camp, instead believing her to be a survivor who resembles her just enough to enable him to cash in on Nelly’s inheritance. As he grooms her to walk and talk like Nelly, reminiscent of what Jimmy Stewart does to Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, she begins finding out things about him that are deeply troubling, including the nightmarish possibility that he might have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis.

Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) doesn’t realize what’s right in front of him in gripping post-WWII noir

Tense and unnerving, Phoenix was inspired by Alexander Kluge’s An Experiment in Love, Hubert Monteilhet’s Return from the Ashes, Harun Farocki’s “Switched Women,” and oral histories from the Shoah Foundation. (Farocki, who passed away in July 2014, collaborated with Petzold on the screenplay.) Hoss and Zehrfeld, who previously worked together in Petzold’s gripping 2012 psychological thriller, Barbara, have an appropriately uneasy chemistry, keeping things off balance as former lovers who pursue an unusual courtship, he unwilling to acknowledge what’s right in front of him, she desperate to be recognized for who she was, and is. It’s a kind of eerie cat-and-mouse game, with more than a touch of Stockholm Syndrome, that intelligently examines a fascinating German amnesia about the war and its victims on a very personal scale. Kunzendorf (Scene of the Crime, Years of Love) is excellent as Lene, a forward-thinking woman who wants to start a new life with Nelly yet is unable to drag her away from her obsession with Johnny, while Zehrfeld (Finsterworld) has just the right amount of trepidation as Johnny pursues his selfish goal. But Hoss, in her sixth film with Petzold (Jerichow, Something to Remind Me), is simply extraordinary, her every movement utterly captivating, portraying complex emotions with remarkable skill. And the ending is simply brilliant, unforgettable. Once it gets past a few minor incongruities, Phoenix rises high, a spellbinding story of a twisted relationship in 1945 Germany that calls upon ancient myth, modern psychology, a nation’s guilt, and love and longing for the past to evoke universal themes — while posing some very difficult questions for everyone.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY, SCULPTING IN TIME: IVAN’S CHILDHOOD

A twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) looks through dark shadows in IVAN’S CHILDHOOD

IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (MY NAME IS IVAN) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, July 24, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

In his 1986 book Sculpting in Time, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “I have to admit that before the appearance of my first full-length work, Ivan’s Childhood, I did not feel that I was a director, nor did the cinema have any inkling of my existence.” That was certainly not the case after the film was released, as it won the Golden Lion at Venice, earned the praises of Jean-Paul Sartre, and went on to have a profound impact on global cinema. Based on a 1957 short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, Ivan’s Childhood is a magnificent tale of a fearless twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) who spies for the Soviets during World War II. But for all of his outward toughness, he is still a child who dreams of another, safer life, wrapped in the welcoming arms of his dead mother (Irma Raush, Tarkovsky’s first wife). Shot in black-and-white by Vadim Yusov, the film opens with Ivan standing behind a large spiderweb, as if being captured in this fateful world is inevitable. The smiling, clean Ivan admires flora and fauna as he floats through the air, but when he comes back to the ground, he sees torn roots that remind him of the family he’s lost to the war and is eventually woken up from this dream and finds himself in the middle of a vast, burned-out landscape littered with death. He ultimately meets up with Capt. Kholin (Valentin Zubkov), Lt. Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), Cpl. Katasonov (Stepan Krylov), and Lt. Col. Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko) in a bunker, where the men decide that it is best for Ivan to go to the state military academy instead of continuing his dangerous reconnaissance missions. But Ivan, whose face is no longer clean but will seemingly be dirty forever, insists that he belongs with them, fighting the Germans. Of course, war is no place for a child, but there is no child quite like Ivan.

IVAN’S CHILDHOOD features breathtaking shots of life during WWII

The first full-length masterpiece of Tarkovsky’s short but brilliant career — he made seven films, in addition to the wonderful short The Steamroller and the Violin, which he wrote with Andrei Konchalovsky, before dying of cancer in 1986 at the age of fifty-four — Ivan’s Childhood is filled with unforgettable shots and poignant vignettes that establish the horrors of war and its effects on the Soviet Union. At one point, Ivan runs away and encounters an old man (Dmitri Milyutenko) pining for his wife as he cowers behind a rickety door in the open air, where his house used to be. In one of the film’s most famous and influential scenes, Capt. Kholin pursues a nurse, Masha (Valentina Malyavina), through a field of white birch trees; he ultimately catches and kisses her, holding her over a trench, his feet on either side of the narrow ditch, her feet dangling in the air, the birches rising in the distance behind him, a breathtaking image that is as ominous as it is beautiful. Later, Ivan feels trapped in a dark room; holding a flashlight and a knife, he rings an alarm bell, then cowers in tears, shown in silhouette, as bombings begin. Soon he is dreaming of happily sharing an apple with a young girl in the rain, the background shown in negative, the symbolism evoking potential tragedy as the girl grows increasingly sadder. Ivan might represent the future of the Soviet Union, but he is experiencing a childhood that no one should, surrounded by death and doom and devastation, his fate inevitable. All four of his dreams involve water, a metaphor for life, but he is drowning in memories (based on Tarkovsky’s own) that do him no good anymore. Tarkovsky made Ivan’s Childhood right out of film school, adapting a screenplay written by Mikhail Papava and working with a tight budget and deadline. Yet he, composer Vyacheslav Ovchinikov, set designer Evgeny Chemyayev, and Yusov were able to produce a spectacular film, a deeply psychological exploration of the end of innocence in the midst of war. “To be honest, in making my first film I had another objective: to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director,” Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time. “In order to come to a definite conclusion I left the reins slack, as it were. I tried not to hold myself back. If the film turns out well, I thought, then I’ll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination.” It was also an unqualified success, leading to one of the great, albeit too brief, careers in cinema.

Ivan’s Childhood is screening July 24 at 7:00 as part of the the Museum of Arts & Design film series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s masterpieces (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a superior craftsman whose cinematic oeuvre is filled with poetry and wonder, mystery and self-examination, exploring life and death, the past, the present, and the future, incorporating mesmerizing sound and visuals in telling complex stories like one else before or since.

TRUE CRIME: M

Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) takes a good look at himself in Fritz Lang classic

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, July 22, 10:00
Series continues through August 5
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Fritz Lang’s first sound film, following such classic silent works as Metropolis and Die Nibelungen, is a masterpiece of precision, a crime thriller nonpareil in its examination of a serial killer, mob justice, and the psychological nature of good and evil. In M — Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, Peter Lorre stars as Hans Beckert, a creepy young man who befriends children before abducting and murdering them. Even with a reward out for his capture, he can’t stop himself from taking yet more little girls, in broad daylight, and writing letters to the police and a local newspaper, practically daring them to catch him. As his spree continues, the local community grows more and more frightened and suspicious, and men and women start looking suspiciously at anyone who even so much as nods to a child on the streets, mass hysteria beckoning. As the police try to figure out a plan of action, the criminals band together and hire beggars to try to track down Beckert, since the larger police presence is negatively impacting their business. Eventually, Beckert, who has a fondness for whistling Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” is spotted with a child, leading to a series of scenes that are simply spectacular in the flow of their movement as the riveting denouement approaches.

In making M, Lang was inspired by real events involving multiple serial killers. Although the film in no way preaches, Lang, who cowrote the script with his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, considered M very much a message picture. On May 20, 1931, he wrote in the German newspaper Die Filmwoche, “If this film based on factual reports helps to point an admonishing and warning finger at the unknown, lurking threat, the chronic danger emanating from the constant presence among us of compulsively and criminally inclined individuals, forming, so to speak, a latent potential that may devour our lives in flames—and especially the lives of the most helpless among us—and if the film also helps, perhaps, even to avert this danger, then it will have served its highest purpose and drawn the logical conclusion from the quintessential facts assembled in it.” M feels eerily prescient and especially relevant today, when parents’ fear for the safety of their children has perhaps never been greater. Seeing adults waiting outside schools, praying for their kids to be out of harm’s way, is something that can now be witnessed across America day after day.

Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) doesn’t like what he sees in M

Lorre (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Maltese Falcon) is exceptional as Beckert, a baby-faced man who might not be quite as evil as everyone imagines. Lang and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (Nosferatu, Diary of a Lost Girl) regularly show Beckert in shadow and in mirrors, as if there are two sides to this child killer. Lang uses no musical score, instead allowing natural sound, and very often pure silence, as Lang (Fury, Ministry of Fear) recognizes that he doesn’t need to overplay his hand. As depicted in the film, if there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, from cops and criminals to blind balloon sellers and mothers and fathers, it’s that there is nothing worse than a man who murders children. Yet Lang ultimately is able to extract some sympathy for Beckert, who makes a powerful plea near the end of the film. Watching M is a gripping, unforgettable experience, despite its terrifying subject matter.

M is screening July 22 at 10:00 as part of Film Forum’s “True Crime” series, which continues through August 5 with such other ripped-from-the-headlines favorites as Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, Tadashi Imai’s Darkness at Noon, John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and double features of Richard Fleischer’s The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and Compulsion and William Friedkin’s The French Connection and The Brink’s Job.

MUSIC DRIVEN / ONE NITE ONLY: REVENGE OF THE MEKONS

Sally Timms and Jon Langford fight the curse of the Mekons in stirring documentary

REVENGE OF THE MEKONS (Joe Angio, 2013)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Wednesday, July 22, $15, 9:45
718-384-3980
www.mekonsmovie.com
www.nitehawkcinema.com

Called “the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll” by Lester Bangs, the Mekons have been making some of the best music on the planet for more than thirty-five years. But despite a rabid fan base and constant critical adoration, the band, which formed at the University of Leeds back in 1977, has never quite made the big time. Joe Angio captures the wild, DIY spirit of this unique music and art collective in the stirring documentary Revenge of the Mekons. Angio (How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company [and Enjoy It]) follows the self-deprecating band — the members of which are quick to joke about their lack of financial and popular success, especially when they’re onstage and learn from fans that an upcoming gig has been canceled — as they celebrate their thirtieth anniversary and record their most recent excellent album, Ancient and Modern. Angio talks with the current Mekons lineup, which includes cofounders Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford along with Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Lu Edmonds, Sarah Corina, Steve Goulding, and Sally Timms, as well as such former members as Kevin Lycett, Mark “Chalkie” White, Andy Corrigan, and Dick Taylor, as they recount the band’s rollicking history, beginning with its Leeds days as a socialist punk band battling over shows with Gang of Four through its mid-1980s transformation into alt-country folk rockers.

Mekons doc is one heckuva wild and crazy show

Mekons doc is one helluva wild and crazy ride, just like their long career

Angio mixes in amazing raw footage from the 1970s with more contemporary scenes as the Mekons, with their usual reckless abandon and utter joyfulness, play such songs as “Where Were You,” “The Hope and the Anchor,” “Ghosts of American Astronauts,” “Millionaire,” “Hello Cruel World,” “Hard to Be Human,” “Memphis, Egypt,” and “The Curse.” Sharing their love of all things Mekons are such wide-ranging pundits as Jonathan Franzen, Greil Marcus, Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham and Andy Gill, Will Oldham, Greg Kot, Craig Finn, Luc Sante, Mary Harron, and performance artist Vito Acconci. Back in October 2011, we wrote that “a world that includes the Mekons is just a better place for everyone,” and that still holds true. So start by watching this wonderfully crazy documentary, about a group of crazy characters who have formed a crazy kind of family, then go out and pick up such seminal records as Fear and Whiskey, The Mekons Honky Tonkin’, So Good It Hurts, The Mekons Rock‘n’Roll, Natural, Ancient Modern, etc., and be sure to catch them live — the full band will be in town July 21 for a show at Bowery Ballroom, and there are still a few tickets left. However, their Mekonception performance at Jalopy on Thursday night, in which they will be recording their next record, is sold out. Revenge of the Mekons is screening July 22 as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s “One Nite Only” and “Music Driven” series, and Angio will be on hand for a Q&A with members of the band, so you have several chances to see just what you’ve been missing.

HIGH LINE ART: SUMMER 2015

New book looks at history of art and performance on the High Line

New book HIGH ART: PUBLIC ART ON THE HIGH LINE looks at history of art and performance on repurposed elevated railway

The High Line
Eleventh Ave. from 34th St. to Gansevoort St.
Open daily, free, 7:00 am – 11:00 pm
www.thehighline.org
a walk across the high line, summer 2015

The High Line itself is a glorious work of art. The transformation of the abandoned West Side elevated railway into a public park thirty feet aboveground, weaving from Thirty-Fourth St. and the West Side Highway to Gansevoort St. by near the entrance to the new Whitney, has led to what has deservedly become one of the city’s must-see, most picturesque locations, a place for plants and trees, food and drink, rest and relaxation, and site-specific public art. In her opening essay in the lovely book High Art: Public Art on the High Line (Skira Rizzoli, May 2015, $45), High Line Art curator and director Cecilia Alemani describes the values she has instilled in the art program: “a dedication to bringing important contemporary art to a wide and diverse audience; a desire to surprise viewers with artworks that utilize public channels of communication in new and challenging ways, prompting them to question the role and function of images in public space; and a conviction that artworks are first and foremost sites of encounter and exchange of opinions and experiences.” The full-color book details the history of art on the High Line, which continues to thrillingly achieve Alemani’s goals, from group shows and film screenings to live performances and participatory events — many of which have been covered here on twi-ny — from Sara Sze’s “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)” and Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell for Every Minute” to Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Roof Piece and Alison Knowles’s “Make a Salad.” The large-size paperback also includes a round-table discussion between Alemani and several other curators of public art that takes a fascinating view of how the discipline is changing and how the art is commissioned and perceived. “We want to bring museum-quality works to the High Line and to make them available to our visitors, free of charge,” Alemani tells fellow curators Nicholas Baume, Sara Reisman, Manon Slome, Nato Thompson, and moderator Renaud Proch. “As simple as it sounds, this is a vision that usually resonates with many supporters who share with us a belief in art not only as a form of civic responsibility but also as a basic right that should be equally available to anyone.”

Visitors are invited to contribute to Olafur Eliasson’s “collectivity project” on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The current art on the High Line is representative of Alemani’s mission. Starting on the north side, Adrián Villar Rojas’s “The Evolution of God” (through July 31) comprises thirteen cement and clay blocks that have been slowly breaking apart and disintegrating since September 2014. Embedded at different levels in the blocks, which are just to the inside of the walking path, are such artifacts as sneakers, bones, and clothing, mimicking an architectural dig that is evolving; meanwhile, new growth is popping up in the blocks’ crevices, signaling life among death, like the High Line itself. “Panorama” (through March 2016) consists of works by a dozen artists that meld into and comment on the High Line’s natural and constructed environment. While “The Evolution of God” falls apart, Olafur Eliasson’s “The collectivity project” (through September 30) rises up, two tons of white Lego bricks that visitors are invited to play with, building imaginary cityscapes amid an area that is seeing actual heavy construction all around its perimeters. Gabriel Sierra’s “Untitled (All Branches Are Firewood)” summarizes the growth of the High Line both physically and in the popular aesthetic, comprising bright yellow measuring sticks that could be seen easily in May but have now been nearly completely overgrown by plants and trees. Kris Martin’s “Altar” turns Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” into a celebration of New York City as a religion unto itself. Ryan Gander’s “To employ the mistress . . . It’s a French toff thing” is a classical-style bust of his wife’s body and upper torso that doubles as a water fountain in which visitors have to try to catch the water as it streams through the air. (Also watch out for Gander’s bronze wallet and cell phone that were left on a bench, as well as a sound piece, “Zooming Out / Toodaloo.”) Damián Ortega’s “Physical Graffiti” is a trio of tags made out of rebar that use the open air, instead of a city train or wall, as a canvas. Andro Wekua’s arched “Window” overlooking Chelsea Piers has now virtually disappeared behind rising plants. You should be able to find your building in Yutaka Sone’s dazzlingly intricate “Little Manhattan New York, New York,” carved in marble. The hardest piece to locate is Katrín Sigurðardóttir’s ecologically minded “Bouvetoya,” a white blob hanging underneath the High Line as you exit by the Whitney, reminiscent of all sorts of things, natural and unnatural, that grow on the undersides of New York structures.

Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “Roof Piece” has been a highlight of the High Line’s innovative performance art programming (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Line has also become home to exciting live performances. Last week, Francisca Benitez’s “As you lean on me and I lean on you, we move forward” combined sign language and improvisation in three chapters in three locations on three different nights. This week Aki Sasamoto’s Food Rental moves into the elevated park, taking place July 21-23 at 7:00 at the Rail Yards by the Thirtieth St. & Eleventh Ave. side. The Japan-born, New York City-based Sasamoto, whose theatrical installation “Strange Attractors” was presented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, will be serving “micro performances and playful narrative demonstrations” from a specially built food cart, doling out unusual little plays with unexpected sets and props. Admission is free, and no RSVP is required. Afterward, you should check out the latest film screening at High Line Channel 14 in the Fourteenth St. Passage, “Before the GIF,” a series of old-style animation works by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg (I’m a Wild Animal, I’m Saving This Egg for Later), Kota Ezawa (Take Off), Lauren Kelley (True Falsetto), Allison Schulnik (Eager), SUN Hun (Shock of Time, People’s Republic of Zoo), and Keiichi Tanaami (OH! YOKO!). In her High Art essay, “The Seriousness of Play: Performance on the High Line,” Adrienne Edwards writes, “Performance on the High Line is an aleatory collision of chance and unanticipated experiences that is the very pulse of the art form itself. Artists and audiences alike are immersed in the unknown possibilities of the bucolic park and its circumferential stages, which enable encounters in the realm of the swerve, which is to say that performance in this particular vector has a unique, more experimental valence, one in which the artists realize a space of the commons through fleeting structures of social choreography.” Yes, a walk across the High Line itself is like performance art, a social choreography unlike any other in this city filled with public art and social choreography.

SUMMER ON THE HUDSON PICTURE SHOW: THE GREAT GATSBY

Nick (Tobey Maguire), Jay (Leonardo DiCaprio), Daisy (Carey Mulligan), and Tom (Joel Edgerton) are caught up in matters of the heart in THE GREAT GATSBY

THE GREAT GATSBY (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)
Pier I, Riverside Park South at 70th St.
Wednesday, July 22, free, 8:00
www.thegreatgatsby.warnerbros.com
www.nycgovparks.org

Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous version of The Great Gatsby is a dazzling reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of old and new money and the American dream. The Australian director and his wife, costume and production designer extraordinaire Catherine Martin, have turned the classic tale into a lush spectacle without losing focus on the main story of life and love during the Roaring Twenties. Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the male lead in Lurhmann’s contemporary take on Romeo + Juliet, is superb as Jay Gatsby, the mystery man previously portrayed by Warner Baxter in 1926, Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974, and Toby Stephens in 2000, adding a compelling level of vulnerability to the character. Gatsby has built a magnificent palace for himself on Long Island, hosting wild parties that he doesn’t care about; all he truly wants is Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a former love who has married successful businessman Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) and lives in a mansion right across the bay. The villainous Tom is having an affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), whose unaware husband, George (Jason Clarke), runs a gas station and garage in the Valley of Ashes. Although a loner, Gatsby befriends his neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young, innocent bond trader who rents a modest home at the base of Gatsby’s enormous estate and whose cousin just happens to be Daisy. As Carraway is sucked into this glamorous, debauched society, which also includes wild and elegant golf champion Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), he is forced to reexamine his own hopes and dreams as he tries to find his place in the world.

Baz Luhrmann throws one helluva party in his reimagining of THE GREAT GATSBY

Luhrmann and cowriter Craig Pearce have framed the tale by putting Carraway, the narrator of the book and film, in a sanitarium, where a doctor (Jack Thompson) convinces him that writing down what happened with Gatsby will help him overcome his alcoholism and depression; the device, which is not part of the novel, is based on Fitzgerald’s own time spent in a sanitarium. Luhrmann and Pearce, who did extensive research for the project, also include elements from Fitzgerald’s Trimalchio, the first draft of The Great Gatsby, which will certainly anger purists. Purists are also likely to be furious at the soundtrack, which features songs by Jay Z (one of the film’s producers), his wife, Beyoncé, André 3000, will.i.am, Lana Del Rey, Gotye, and the xx alongside Jazz Age re-creations by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” and Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.” But this is not your high school English teacher’s Gatsby; instead, it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald for the twenty-first century, not meant to be seen through the billboard spectacles of oculist Dr. T. J. Eckleburg but through 3-D glasses that invite viewers into the oh-so-fashionable goings-on in eye-popping ways. “Is all this made entirely from your own imagination?” Daisy asks Gatsby at one point. In this case, it’s made from the minds of two wildly inventive men, Luhrmann and Fitzgerald, who together throw one helluva party. Nominated for two Academy Awards (for costume and production design), The Great Gatsby is screening July 22 as part of the free Summer on the Hudson Picture Show series in Riverside Park, which continues Wednesday nights through August 12 with Beasts of the Southern Wild on July 29, Moonrise Kingdom on August 5, and Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax on August 12 before concluding with The Fantastic Mr. Fox on August 13.