Still courtesy of Daniel Smith/Bazmark Film III Pty Limited 
 
 After you've seen The Great Gatsby, come back and listen to our Spoiler Special: 
 
 Dana Stevens Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic. 
 
 As Nick Carraway, the mild-mannered but eagle-eyed narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, observes in the book’s early pages, “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” So it was with a Zen mind that I tried to approach Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the book, which, intelligent debunkings aside, I really do regard as one of the great American novels of the 20th century—and probably inherently unfilmable. Literary adaptations of books in which the language is all—particularly the work of high-modern prose stylists like Fitzgerald, Proust, Nabokov, Woolf—seem doomed to either plodding literalism or airy insubstantiality. (Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita had a nasty sense of humor all its own, but the script, written by Nabokov himself, dispensed almost entirely with the narrative voice that makes the novel so perversely seductive.) 
 
 Then there was the fact that Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of such grand-scale entertainments as Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, was the one who would be turning Fitzgerald’s economic tone poem of a novel into a big, glitzy 3-D spectacle. I’ve never been fond of Luhrmann’s films, and have only been able to tolerate a couple. (I think I walked out of Moulin Rouge, back when I wasn’t a film critic and could indulge in such luxuries.) His mania for heaping one visual excess atop another—look at this! No, look at this!— strikes me as a form of directorial ADD, an inability to let himself or the audience rest. And as a member of that winded audience, I sense an implicit condescension in Luhrmann’s tendency to flag and then re-flag a film’s major themes as his films go on—themes that were not introduced subtly the first time around. In Baz Luhrmann movies, ideas arrive with an ensemble. 
 
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 But of course, The Great Gatsby is the story of a supremely unsubtle man given to bold gestures and flashy set pieces, so maybe Luhrmann was born to adapt it. At any rate, his Great Gatsby was nowhere near as terrible as I feared. It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies. And far from betraying the spirit of Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann (along with his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce) treats the book with a loving mix of straight-ahead reverence and postmodern playfulness. During the huge, highly choreographed party sequences that structure the story (this isn’t a musical, but the recurring music- and dance-heavy sequences make it feel like one), you’re more likely to hear Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Lana Del Rey than you are a tinny vintage recording of “Ain’t We Got Fun?”, the flapper-age standard that figures in a scene in the novel and that played at the end of the stillborn 1974 Robert Redford version. Luhrmann’s use of contemporary pop may spring mainly from a desire to sell soundtrack albums, but the notion of using hip-hop as a backdrop for Jazz Age euphoria makes sense: With his new wealth, loud pink suit, and impossibly sweet crib, Gatsby is a rap star before his time. 
 
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 Dance-floor playlists aside, this Gatsby unfolds in a fairly conventional period setting (though this is the ’20s as seen through a distorting kaleidoscope, everything a little bigger and louder and lusher than life). In a klutzy frame story that’s absent from the novel, we meet Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) at a sanatorium where he’s recovering from “morbid alcoholism” and assorted mental maladies. He begins to tell his story to a benevolent, Santa Claus-like shrink, who provides him with a pen and paper with which to write it down. Later Nick will trade these tools in for a typewriter; whatever writing tool he uses, the words will occasionally drift up around him on the screen, then break apart and drift around him in a cloud of floating 3-D letters. It’s a hokey device, but the Nick-as-author conceit gives us an excuse to listen to some choice passages of Fitzgerald’s prose, which Maguire, giving a surprisingly quiet performance at this chaotic movie’s heart, delivers beautifully. Thematically, though, it does seem a mistake to turn The Great Gatsby into a self-referential bildungsroman about a young man’s journey to healing through authorship. When Nick finally pens in “The Great” over his manuscript’s original title Gatsby, we don’t so much feel pride in his accomplishment as annoyance at his smugness—he’s supposed to be telling us this story out of necessity, not ambition. 
 
 The story Nick has to tell is one that anyone who’s graduated high school in the United States surely knows, at least in CliffsNotes form: The mysterious tycoon Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) owns a gaudy estate next door to Nick’s rented cottage in the fictional Long Island village of West Egg. At one of his extravagant all-night flapper blowouts, Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting with Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a dazzling former debutante whom Gatsby once loved and lost as a younger, poorer man. Daisy lives directly across the sound in old-money East Egg with her rich brute of a husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and is constantly flanked by her best friend Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), an icy-cool golf champion. Over the course of a summer, Nick is drawn into the orbit of these wealthy, powerful, lost people, whom he recognizes as a “rotten crowd” only after their unthinking cruelty has already caused irreparable harm. 
 
 Every image and set piece you remember from the novel—the crumbling oculist’s billboard that looms over the action with judging eyes; Gatsby flinging his collection of custom-made shirts at an overcome, weeping Daisy (and, thanks to the 3-D format, directly at us); the hot afternoon at the Plaza Hotel when the rivalry for Daisy’s affections comes to a head—is rendered in broad, operatic gestures. There were many moments when that broadness made me cringe: Does the CGI-aided camera always have to race at jet-ski speed across the water toward the symbolic green light on Daisy’s dock? Must Gatsby’s face really be seen for the first time against a backdrop of fireworks, as the climax of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” surges on the soundtrack? And yet for every slab of processed cheese, there’s another moment whose visual inventiveness pays off. In an early scene, Luhrmann turns one image in the novel—Nick looking out the window at a party, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”—into a clever Rear Window-style tableau of a Manhattan apartment building bursting with untold stories. 
 
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 Leonardo DiCaprio makes as good a Jay Gatsby as any living actor I can think of—he captures the character’s fixed-in-time boyishness as well as his innocent hucksterism, and he looks like a (dubiously ethical) million bucks in the splendiferous costumes by Catherine Martin, the director's wife (who also designed the dizzyingly lavish, champagne-and-confetti-drenched production—she must have been one tired woman by the time shooting ended). But DiCaprio’s physical presence seems almost superfluous in some key scenes, as Maguire’s voice-over narrates the idealistic striver’s actions faster than he can complete them. Our first glimpse of Gatsby, before even the Gershwin-accompanied debut described above, is a shot of his be-ringed hand reaching toward that oft-revisited green light as Nick describes watching his enigmatic neighbor … reach for a green light off a dock. Luhrmann doesn’t just gild the lily, he spray-paints it with glow-in-the-dark sparkles. ||||| When news emerged three years ago that filmmaker Shane Salerno and writer David Shields were working on a lengthy oral biography (with accompanying documentary) about J.D. Salinger, I assumed it would be all smoke and no fire. Salinger, after all, had gone to ground after the publication of his novella “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the June 19, 1965, issue of the New Yorker; even in the wake of his death, in January 2010 at age 91, his estate had preserved the silence of his final 45 years. 
 
 What had he been doing for all that time at his hilltop retreat in Cornish, N.H.? Writing, certainly: Witnesses, including his former lover Joyce Maynard and his daughter, Margaret, who published back-to-back memoirs in 1998 and 2000, had already told us that. But what, exactly, had he written? And how had he persevered? 
 
 The latter question is perhaps more essential in regard to Salinger than any other 20th century American writer, for in his four slim books — “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” — he sought to offer instructions for living, producing less stories per se than parables, or koans. 
 
 When Franny Glass, the youngest sibling in his fictional family of saints and martyrs, declares, “I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm,” she is speaking for Salinger, without question. But she is also sending a message he wants the rest of us to hear. 
 
 Salerno and Shields' book “Salinger,” it turns out, is an exploration of those messages, which Salinger seeded throughout his life and work. At nearly 700 pages, it's a bit of a shaggy monster, yet what may be most astonishing about it is its (largely) even tone. 
 
 The idea is to present a portrait of Salinger as both his own savior and something considerably darker; among its most troubling revelations is that Salinger pursued and even (in some cases) seduced teenage women; Maynard, who was 18 when he wooed her, was neither the first nor the last. 
 
 The book has already been in the news for uncovering, in the closing pages, plans to publish five new volumes of Salinger's writing, beginning in 2015. It's a mark of Salerno and Shields' achievement, however, that this seems in the end beside the point. Of course, if there were work, it would emerge eventually, although I fear that may be a mixed blessing at best. 
 
 Don't get me wrong: I'd read a laundry list if Salinger had a hand in it, but in the last years before his retreat, his writing began to grow increasingly insular, as if, the authors suggest here, he were writing for an audience of one. “Hapworth” is, to be frank, a disaster, a 20,000-plus-word letter narrated by Seymour Glass, then 7, who famously kills himself at the end of the 1948 story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Stilted, pedantic, it is, Shields observes, “dead on arrival — deliberately, angrily, fascinatingly so.” 
 
 The question is why — why Salinger deliberately set out to embrace anger and renunciation (or, perhaps, the Joycean trinity of “silence, exile and cunning”) and what this tells us about him not only as a writer but also as a human being. 
 
 “Salinger” argues that it begins and ends with World War II. 
 
 This is not a new theory; it was explored in Kenneth Slawenski's disappointing 2011 biography “J.D. Salinger: A Life,” which relies more on conjecture than reporting to make its case. But Salerno and Shields get the goods, digging up information on Salinger's war buddies, including Paul Fitzgerald, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence, and tracing the shattering sequence of his service on the battlefield, which began with D-Day and ended nine months later with the liberation of the concentration camp Kaufering IV. 
 
 “You can never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” Salinger once told his daughter Margaret. In Europe, in summer 1945, he had a breakdown, and returned home with what we now would identify as post-traumatic stress disorder. 
 
 “He put his arms on the table and rested his head upon them,” Salinger writes in “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” a rare fictional evocation of his war experience. “He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.” 
 
 Considered through such a filter, Salinger's life becomes a saga defined by its own trauma and the books a series of small miracles that, by all rights maybe, never should have existed at all. It's a point Salerno and Shields make explicit late in their own book, suggesting that “[t]he wounds made him; for nearly a decade, he transformed the wounds into agony-fueled art, and then — because he could not abide his own body, himself, his own war-ruined mind, the attention, the criticism, the love — he came to revile the world.” 
 
 At the same time, they argue, this was a double-edged process, in which he did an odd dance with his solitude, offering occasional interviews (most tellingly a 1974 conversation with the New York Times' Lacey Fosburgh) and even appearing in court in 1986 to give a deposition in his lawsuit against biographer Ian Hamilton. 
 
 “There's a part of him,” observes Salinger scholar John Wenke, “that enjoys the power game that went on when the Ian Hamilton biography was making its way through the courts. … An actual recluse or mystic wouldn't care.” 
 
 Wenke's right, which is why Salinger continues to fascinate us, half a century after his last published words. “Salinger” is at its best in tracing these contradictions — the litigious tender of his public image and the man whose last words were, reportedly, “I am in this world but not of it” — and in using them to humanize the author by revealing the depths of his flaws. 
 
 As for what's missing, I wish Salerno and Shields had given more information about who is speaking: Each chapter is a litany of names without attribution, leaving us unsure from whom we're hearing and why. There is also an unfortunate tendency to mix interview material with passages from published works, without distinguishing between them on the page. Interpretive chapters on “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Nine Stories,” as well as one on the role of “Catcher” in the crimes of Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr. and Robert Bardo, fall flat.
– The Great Gatsby is about to get the celluloid treatment again. And while we can only hope that Baz Luhrmann does it justice, a great book does not automatically equal a great film. (The Scarlett Letter much?) The Huffington Post lists 15 novels that it considers "unfilmable": Pale Fire, by Vladamir Nabokov: Truly a riddle, this footnote-ridden book revolves around a 999-line poem. The Waves, by Virginia Woolf: It's basically six monologues, making the book one big monologue. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: It's not the book, so much as the author, that's the issue here. A famously private recluse, HuffPo can't imagine him giving anyone the movie rights. Maus by Art Spiegelman: This Holocaust-era biography/graphic novel about Spiegelman's father depicts the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats ... just too serious for a cartoon. Notes HuffPo, it's tough when your pitch is: "Think Schindler's List, but with dogs and reindeer." Click here for the complete list, which, of course, includes a book by James Joyce.