The Gatsby is flat

...and Baz Luhrmann's film, The Great Gatsby is, in the spirit of Fitzgerald's novel, anti-fantasist.

In The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby, Joshua Rothman does a fine plucking out of what precisely F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American classic ought to be truly remembered for, and how director Baz Luhrmann's celluloid rendition of the novel gets it.

The film is "flat," the characters are "flatter" claim many critics of the movie, and Rothman says:

[...] I can’t help but feel that the film’s flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann’s imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald’s. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that’s why Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” compared them to “ideographs.” Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald’s characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. “You always look so cool,” Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles “an advertisement” of a man.

But the "flatness" is insightful in that:

It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t think that fantasies work that way. In “Gatsby,” everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him—to be swept up into a fantasy that’s narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a “beautiful little fool.”