Baz Luhrman and The Great Gatsby were not made for each other, but that does not mean the flashy director’s approach was doomed from the start. Luhrmann recently told The New York Times that he first imagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel as a drawing room piece, and that “the person responsible for making the film “epic” was really F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

You know what? He’s right. Gatsby’s world is not that of button-downed privilege but of extravagant decadence. And what filmmaker today can convey that better than Luhrmann? The decision to make the film in 3-D is not as arbitrary as it seems. What is 3-D but a 21st-century multiplex equivalent of art deco tromp l’oeil? Three-dimensional projections offer the illusion of depth, a perfectly apt metaphor for Fitzgerald’s lost, vapid characters.

But Luhrmann’s Gatsby is still a failure, and not even an interesting one. Its boat too often rides along the current, borne safely into mediocrity.

It doesn’t go far enough.

Luhrmann’s strengths and weaknesses come into play in a pivotal scene from early in the novel. Tom Buchanan takes his cousin, narrator Nick Carraway to an impromptu party at a Manhattan apartment. Tom has an assignation with his mistress Myrtle Wilson. As the evening progresses and the whiskey flows, time passes, one imagines, in a kind of fever dream. Suddenly, Tom strikes his mistress, breaking her nose. Fitzgerald plays the scene as one where his unreliable narrator becomes more and more unsteady, drunk and finally coming to at 4 a.m. at the old Pennsylvania Station.

Jack Clayton’s widely panned 1974 version of Gatsby plays this scene straight. There is no sense of visual inebriation, but even before Bruce Dern’s Tom hits Karen Black’s Myrtle, you can sense the brutality.

Luhrmann’s penchant for garish dazzle has fans of the novel worried, but his version of this scene goes in the right direction. The escalating party sees Nick (Tobey Maguire) go from teetotaling milquetoast to shirtless Spring Breaker in a matter of moments. But the volatile couple at the heart of the scene doesn’t register. Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan spends the whole movie looking like an anonymous lug, a Hollywood stereotype with a villainous moustache. He looks like a violent and debauched man, but one of style, an accusation that was never leveled against Dern. Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is bland and unthreatening, Isla Fisher’s Myrtle Wilson just a cheap floozy, perhaps the most two-dimensional element in Luhrmann’s 3-D fantasy. When this Tom hits that Myrtle, there’s no shock, just style.

This scene gives us one of the novel’s classic lines. An overwhelmed Nick muses, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Luhrmann makes decent hay out of this: We see Maguire looking out the apartment at a Rear Window-like scene, the microcosmic vision of a vibrant, racially mixed New York in the 1920s juxtaposed with his pasty sourpuss.

But the pleasure of Gatsby has always been in the prose, not the its plot, and that prose comes from narrator Carraway’s myth-making internal dialogue. You’d think Luhrmann would be the director to capture the dazzling myth. But for a moment, he captures, in a corny but vivid image, something of that inner drama.

The movie begins with a number of cheats and short cuts. The opening images are black and white with a layer of fake film grain and scratches, which seem less homage than condescension to old technology.

Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan (Warner Bros. Pictures)

The screenplay, which Luhrmann wrote with Craig Pearce, gives Nick a framing device. The action begins after the events of the novel, with Nick in a psychiatric clinic. Nick’s doctor encourages him to write down exactly what happened, and he does. This lets the movie bathe in some of Fitzgerald’s prose but the screenwriters flatten it by explaining things Fitzgerald never explained. “Everybody drank a lot, in tune with the times.” Fitzgerald didn’t self-consciously write about the times he wrote of the times and from the times, and clunkers like this are exactly what fans of the novel feared.

Even so, this framing device has some visual rewards. The novel’s action breaks away now and then to return to Nick in the sanitarium. Looking out from a snowy window, Nick seems trapped in a Joseph Cornell box. The reclusive artist created and captured myths, often inspired by movies, in enclosed shadowboxes, and such a conceit is not out of step with the book. But such visual grace notes are few.

If Maguire is too schmucky to stay in the background as a mere observer, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby both capture something of the sad alienation of the privileged (would that Sofia Coppola took on this project). But Tom needed to be a commanding presence, and Edgerton is not it. His Zero Dark Thirty co-star Jason Clarke does better in the small but crucial role of George Wilson—if only his agent had landed him Tom. The most curious casting is Bollywood action star Amitabh Bachchan as the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim. Bachchan is one of the world’s most popular actors, and he brings a seigniorial elegance to a minor role, but his presence can’t help but make the audience dream of a really lavish Gatsby, Bollywood style.

Finally, that much dreaded soundtrack. When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, jazz was an exciting, and to some ears, scary expression of popular sentiment. If anything, Jay-Z’s much anticipated, much dreaded soundtrack isn’t jarring enough. The little jazz heard in Luhrmann’s movie sounds dirtier and sexier than the modern pop songs. If the movie’s first drunken debauch reminded me of a more restrained Spring Breakers, then the answer to an updated soundtrack would clearly be Skrillex.

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is not a complete disaster, but it may be something worse. Boring.

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The Great Gatsby
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton
Rated PG-13 for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language
Running time 143 minutes