But will he be great as Gatsby?

So, it falls to the lot of Leonardo DiCaprio to play Jay Gatsby in Baz Lurhmann's 3-D filming of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Tobey Maguire has been cast as Nick Carraway, while Carey Mulligan is Daisy, the spoiled socialite who has an affair with Gatsby, whom she was in love with before marrying the boorish millionaire Tom Buchanan.
DiCaprio? Tobey Maguire? 3-D? Yes, the alarm bells are ringing. This could be one of the greatest disasters of all time. A sliver of hope, however, is provided by Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet, a brilliant music video of a Shakespearean classic that perfectly captured the Zeitgeist of the MTV generation. Shakespeare's tragedy had been conceived for the stage, but Gatsby was created for the page so it can no more be filmed than Shakespeare can be sculpted. What a film director can do, however, is take the visual aspects of the story — the beauty of Long Island, the magic of Manhattan, the parties, the drinking, the fighting, money, music, murder, the excesses of the rich, the roar of the Roaring Twenties — and blend them into something as exquisite as Fitzgerald once did:

"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."

Faced with this kind of ineffable enchantment, there's always the danger that Luhrmann will take fright and give us another version of the execrable Australia. Gatsby, by the way, is being filmed in Australia. What could go wrong?