“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can,” urges Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann’s high-octane adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which opens today after a worrisome stutter step and both fevered and dreaded anticipation. The famous line, which in the novel breaks the code on Gatsby’s “twilight universe” and portends his doom, illuminates the screen with a cautionary subtext Fitzgerald didn’t intend: Please Baz, don’t you do it! Repeating the lifeless moviemaking past of this masterpiece would again give the world something far less than great. “There are no second acts in American lives,” Fitzgerald famously claimed
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