The Great Gatsby

We await the coming cover profiles mentioning this long-delayed release with bated breath.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Vanity Fair, December 2012

Headline: "YES, LEO'S BACK! Hollywood's Ultimate Bad Boy Goes Back to the Roaring Twenties--and Aims At Oscar"

Editorial Concept: Leo plays with a baby tiger cub, smokes a cigar by a pool, walks through a hedge maze.

Carey Mulligan (Daisy), Vogue, November 2012

Headline: "SECRETS OF EAST EGG: Carey Mulligan as the Woman Who Stole Gatsby's Heart"

Editorial Concept: Done entirely in character, with special attention to the scene with all Gatsby's shirts on the floor.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Esquire, November 2012

Headline: "THE TAO OF TOBEY: Hollywood's Hottest Recluse on Fitzgerald, Film, Finding Contentment--and What He's Learned Along the Way"

Editorial Concept: Looking stern on a golf course.

Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), GQ, October 2012

Headline: "TIE ONE ON! The 12 Neckties You Need Now"

Editorial Concept: Mr. Edgerton models a bunch of ties.

Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Allure, January 2013

Headline: "IT'S ISLA! Mrs. Borat (That's Right!) On Her Big New Role"

Editorial Concept: Best mascaras for your hair color.

So, which party had the best-dressed attendees?

Last night, at what is widely hyped as the best night in New York fashion, the attendees of the annual gala benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute did not disappoint. Patterns, we saw a few: a lot of black, a lot of neon, a lot of feathers, and a lot of sheer. And Beyonce's dress? We still don't know what to think. See our picks for best and most bewildering are in this slideshow, and read our rundown from the red carpet here.

Mr. Fassbender.

Too much sex is bad for you. That’s the only message discernible to the naked eye in an interesting but hollow film about sex addiction called Shame, and believe me when I tell you the eye is not the only thing in it that is naked. The star is Michael Fassbender, the versatile and fearless actor of Irish-German descent who skyrocketed to attention as the imprisoned IRA hunger-strike martyr Bobby Seale in Hunger. He can also currently be seen, in and out of his underwear, as psychiatrist Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method. Mr. Fassbender is excellent and intense, but he hasn’t much use for clothes. Casting him in anything saves money on the wardrobe budget.

Shame, which reunites him with cheeky British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen (who will never be taken seriously unless he changes his name; somebody else got there first), centers on a New York businessman named Brandon who eats, breathes, and thinks of nothing else 24/7 but sex and more sex. He can’t get enough of it. He orders an early-morning prostitute before work, and when she leaves he hits the shower and works himself over again. Sex by proxy? He’s into that, too. At the office, he goes to the men’s room and knocks off another quickie. Home from work, he wastes a lot of time watching Internet porn in a state of, shall we say, stimulation? He’s intelligent, well-educated, sartorial and well-groomed, but hermetically sealed against life’s emotional pitfalls. He has no interest in food and consumes endless liters of alcohol only to dull his senses. Lonely and alienated, he doesn’t read, watch movies, attend the theater, root for a ball team, travel or explore new restaurants. Sex is his nutrition, and any attempt at normal dating ends before it begins. A mere hint of commitment leads to erectile dysfunction, sending Brandon plummeting further into the dark abyss, experimenting with all forms of sex in every combination. Mr. Fassbender’s focus is on showing every insatiable moment of this kind of orgasmic compulsion, exposing more of himself than ever. Quite a bit more, as a matter of fact. You might say he lets it all hang out—in more ways than one. The hunky star, it must be added, is in very good shape for the assignment.

Brandon keeps his fetishes a secret until the intrusive arrival of his neurotic, suicide-prone nymphomaniac sister Sissy (another heartbreaking performance by Carey Mulligan), a bottle blonde with black roots and no inhibitions. She’s like a sex toy—still an English rose, but this time with the bloom rubbed off. Two drinks and she’s anybody’s—including Brandon’s married boss. Watching her own promiscuity at work in his own apartment only magnifies Brandon’s own perverse problems. Neither of them can commit to a real relationship and their frustration brings out the worst in each other as they forge a love-hate co-dependence based on sex, sibling needs and verbal abuse. Self-destruction seems inevitable, but while we wait for something to move the action along, we have to watch a pair of emotional twin train wrecks happening simultaneously. In a movie that leaves nothing to the imagination, this much existential nonstop misery holds a certain fascination, but the movie never comes to anything valid or cautionary a normal viewer might take home.

Shame builds a repellent and depressing picture of existence on the edge of insanity, but what the movie fails to do is tell you why these people are the way they are, or indeed, why their addictions are so unhealthy. It’s actually surprising how empty and boring nonstop sex can be. When it substitutes for plot, character, movement and emotional content, sex is just something that clogs up the hard drive on your office computer. Brandon is spiritually dead, Sissy is parasitic and totally lost. When they both hit rock bottom, he goes on a real binge and hits the gay bars in a gruesome and ferocious eruption of carnal violence, and she ends up in the hospital. It’s hard, zombie sex, without joy. This, of course, is the point. But patience wears thin. It’s the study of a man whose soul has been peeled away, like coring an apple. But I wouldn’t call it sexy—or entertaining. What does Brandon learn? What do we learn? Director McQueen shares no primal truths, offers no resolutions, and the movie seems pointless. It seems almost wicked to spread on all that enticement and titillation, and then throw the sandwich away.

rreed@observer.com

SHAME

Running Time 101 minutes

Written by Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen

Directed by Steve McQueen

Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan and James Badge Dale

2/4

Ms. Mulligan, Ms. Williams, Ms. Dunst.

“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown.

It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Shame, a sexually violent fantasia in which Mr. Fassbender beds scores of random women in every dirty corner of Manhattan—including a few times against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms of the hotel we were standing atop.

What better venue for the after party?

“This hotel …” the actor said. “I was staying in the rooms, once, and was told, ‘Beware! People can see inside.’”

Mr. Fassbender lit a cigarette and sat down at the table next to three of his oldest friends—buddies from his youth in County Kerry, Ireland. He had insisted on a roundtable conversation.

“How much of the sex was real?” we asked.

Here’s some context: Shame’s tamer scenes, which conceal nothing from the camera, find Mr. Fassbender engaging in sex under the Williamsburg Bridge, sex with prostitutes, sex with random men in a cavernous clubs, and of course sex in rooms at the Standard, for the entertainment of pedestrians on Little West 12th. (Don’t worry—things get wild toward the end.)

“Um, next question,” Mr. Fassbender said. “Now you gotta ask my mates one!”

“What was it like watching your buddy have more sex than you can ever imagine?” we asked.

“Unfortunately I haven’t yet seen his crown jewels!” one of them said. “I haven’t seen the film.”

“It’s really something,” The Observer responded.

“What is?” Mr. Fassbender asked, taking a last drag. “My crown jewels?”

“Well, I meant the film is really something,” we stuttered. “But, yeah, I have seen them now, I guess.”

“But I haven’t seen yours!” he shot back.

Mr. Fassbender downed his martini—his character, Brandon, was fond of the same cocktail, we remembered—and revealed that he hadn’t been with these guys, his closest friends, since 2001.

“We needed a significant break after we had a go at it,” said one of the friends.

Then they all started chiming in.

“We can only see each other every 10 years.

“I just got over it.”

“The shaking just stopped.”

“But we did a road trip together!” Mr. Fassbender interrupted. “And we were gonna call Marco’s ass up in Italy. Why didn’t we do that?”

“Because we were constantly drunk and we had the memory of a fucking goldfish!”

“Ah, that’s right.”

Steve McQueen, the film’s director, chose the Boom Boom Room for the film’s centerpiece scene, in which Carey Mulligan, playing Mr. Fassbender’s chanteuse little sister, sings “New York, New York” as the camera refuses to waver from her mascara-heavy eyelids.

“A lot of New Yorkers live in the sky, work in the sky, spend their time in the sky,” Mr. McQueen had noted during the postscreening Q&A. And when we spoke with him at the Boom Boom Room, it was up against the glass, with the docks and piers dangling out below us.

“This is the first time I’ve been back since we shot here …” he said. His eyes wandered downward. “The view, the expanse of water!”

After another drink next to a table where Olivia Wilde sat with Zoe Kazan, it was time to go. The cast cleared out too: this was just a small respite from the go-go of anyone involved in the New York Film Festival, where the fall’s slew of Oscar-bait pictures make their first impressions on filmgoers.

Two days later, another bash was underway at the Hudson Hotel in honor of Michelle Williams, who plays the blonde bombshell of the title in My Week With Marilyn.

“Does she pull off Marilyn Monroe?” Harvey Weinstein was asked. He was standing next to an enormous tin water pitcher that decorated the hotel terrace. “Well, see the film, then let me know. Me? Oh, I think she definitely pulls it off.”

Ms. Williams was herself at the party, but at Alice Tully Hall later that night she was Ms. Monroe—My Week With Marilyn is, after all, a film with actors playing actors. As we sat down for the screening, buzzed on a Negroni impetuously purchased from a Lincoln Center lobby cocktail cart, Ms. Williams-as-Marilyn began dancing on the screen-within-a-screen, as Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Olivier sat in his own theater puffing on cigarette after cigarette. If only!

And all of this after our festival began with the earth caroming into a much larger planet in a deafening bonanza of fire—twice, actually—in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which premiered last Monday. It’s a glorious dismantling of terrestrial cores and emotional cores, an expansive vision set to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

And it wasn’t even the only end of the world going on. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, which also premiered at the festival, ends as you’d expect, and takes place on the Lower East Side. Oddly, on our way to My Week With Marilyn, we witnessed a plane etching the words “LAST CHANCE” across the sky.

Yet, despite Melancholia’s global destruction, the cast managed to make it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the after-party. (Mr. Von Trier, who infamously referred to himself as a Nazi when the film opened in Cannes, didn’t make the trip—then again, he’s never been to the United States.)

“I would definitely be with my family for sure,” Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Kirsten Dunst’s doltish (and doomed!) new husband, said to The Observer of his doomsday plans. “Where else would you want to be?”

“I don’t know, man” Ms. Dunst said to us. “I’d hopefully be with my family. It would be nice to be in the forest somewhere, chilling out. It’s such an awful thing to think about. What would you do?”

We told her we’d probably try to have a last night of fun.

First though, there were trays of truffle grilled cheese bites to eat, and DeLeon Tequila apple cocktails to down. The end would have to wait a little longer.

nfreeman@observer.com

Carey! Get back to reading!

Last time we ran into Carey Mulligan, outside an event she was hosting at the roof terrace of the Gramercy Park Hotel, she was in good spirits. She was riding the wave of breathless raves of her performance in Through A Glass Darkly, which was then in the middle of its run at the New York Theater Workshop. "The 26-year-old Ms. Mulligan," Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, "more than confirms her promise as one of the finest actresses of her generation."

She was also gearing up for her role in a over-the-top 3D extravaganza helmed by Baz Luhrmann.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby,"  she told The Observer.

“Oh, my god, that’s amazing!” her friend, actress Zoe Kazan, said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

This was fun, but it seems the kidding around has ended. In an interview during the Comic-Con mania going on in San Diego, she explains the stacks of reading material she's been studying in preparation for her role as Daisy Buchanan. Hopefully she's also taking speech lessons with someone who will make her voice sound like money.

So, what's on the reading list?

"I went to Princeton, where they keep all of his papers, and I got to look at Zelda Fitzgerald's medical records and the first manuscript of The Great Gatsby," Ms. Mulligan said in a video shot by Empire Online. "I was, like, 'Can I take a photo?' and they were, like, 'No.' We all have research files so, like, six books to read and a folder this thick ,and we got little iPods with videos on it, and all the music"

Presumably, "all the music" refers to period ditties all the kids would listen to as they Charleston the night away. Though considering Mr. Luhrmann's history of mashing up period drama with modern music, it could really be anything. Perhaps even the director's own "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)." No, Baz, we haven't forgotten.

Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

THE SUN HAD NOT GONE DOWN outside the Gramercy Park Hotel when Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan started talking about their leather.

“It’s the fucking leather,” Ms. Mulligan said, touching Ms. Kazan’s slit-laden Valentino dress.

Ms. Kazan made a deep purring noise and knocked her pointed heels at the ground.

“You’ve never done that,” said her boyfriend, actor Paul Dano. “I like that…”

“You could do some serious damage with those shoes,” The Observer pointed out.

The actress flung a mischievous look back.

“Don’t you think I’m not thinking about it.”

“She’s so spiky when she’s wearing leather!” Ms. Mulligan, also in Valentino, said. “I’m wearing demure leather.”

“I’m demure with my—”

“There’s nothing demure about that dress.”

Ms. Kazan and Ms. Mulligan had come to the hotel for the Lincoln Center Institute’s Junior Spring Benefit, which they were hosting with Rightor Doyle, Mamie Gummer and Lily Rabe, other regally cumbersome names that catch eyes when they pop up in playbills and film credits.

As the rest of the committee found their seats among the faux-botanical terrace above the penthouse, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan, along with extra man Mr. Dano, had happened to walk outside as The Observer made a late arrival.

“Is that a prop?” Ms. Kazan asked us, grabbing at the magazine in our jacket pocket.

The Observer explained that we were enjoying an article on Arthur Rimbaud.

“That’s pretty gay,” Ms. Kazan said.

“Carey,” The Observer redirected, “aren’t you in a book adaptation coming up?”

“What book adaptation?” Ms. Kazan gasped.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby.”

“Oh my god that’s amazing!” she said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

The future Daisy Buchanan said filming would start in September, in director Baz Lurhmann’s home country of Australia.

“In Australia, that’s where the book is set, right?” Ms. Kazan said.

Ms. Mulligan nodded.

“It’s a great Australian novel.”

Eventually, the crowd of women grew, all of them seemingly in Valentino. (Was that a photographer in Valentino? A server in Valentino?) They greeted their fellow league board members, hugged, pecked on the cheek. Lunch plans were made.

“Do you want to go to the Colony Club?” said a young woman to a few other women, over cigarettes. “We’ll have the best table. Considering you’re my only friends who are members, we should probably go.”

And later, The Observer found a piece of jewelry.

“That was my grandmother’s!” Ms. Kazan informed The Observer, as we plucked a silver and opal bracelet from the ground and fastened it to her wrist.

It was time for dinner, but before they could sit down, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan had to have one more talk about their Valentino dresses.

“You’re not allowed to wear anything but leather,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I really like leather, Zoe.”

She again started grinding and smacking her heels.

“Yeah, yeah, lean over,” Ms. Kazan said to Ms. Mulligan.

“I think it’s bend over,” said Mr. Dano, suggesting the more common parlance.

“Lean over!” Ms. Kazan repeated. “Lean over!”

“Bless you!” Ms. Mulligan said, in a high-pitched English church-girl voice. “Lean over, please.”

“Arch your back in the convex position!” Ms. Kazan said.

Mr. Dano, who had not yet addressed The Observer, bent near our recorder.

“Print all that,” he said, smiling.

Except for the bank name, the sentence is a word-for-word recreation of the opening to Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone epic about the Goldman Sachs vampire squid.

Oddly, Frozen Truth turns out to be a real Web site. But it's a life-blog written by a Canadian interested in things like "integral consciousness." His name is Apollo Lemmon. "I was very surprised to learn that it had been used by someone else," Mr. Lemmon wrote The Observer after deadline, when asked about the name, "and doubly surprised that it had been used by someone such as Oliver Stone. I haven't been contacted by anyone involved with the film. I imagine it was an oversight."

The real Frozen Truth, according to a tag cloud on the site, includes the Canadian's thoughts on meditation, science fiction, transhumanism, Ken Wilber, polyamory, exercise and film.