Does "Manhattan's stone canyons" mean "Manhattan's streets that are like stone canyons"?

Context:

The Grating 'Gatsby'
Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby' is a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.
The production is not insipid, let's give it that. An exercise in absurdist excess, this fourth screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, means to dramatize the excesses of the Jazz Age, with hints of Weimar decadence thrown in for bad measure. But that's a banality by this late date, and it's as far as Mr. Luhrmann goes in making sense of the book. The film's only governing principle is maximalism -- everything has been made as big as possible, apart from conversational interludes, when big feelings are displayed, like bullet points, by actors striking static poses.
For a while the sheer scale of the thing keeps you engaged, if not agog. (I watched through 3-D glasses that weren't worth the bother.) Gatsby's mansion is a cross between Neuschwanstein Castle and what San Simeon might have been if Hearst had been more gregarious; partygoers swarm like cicadas, and make as much of a racket. A road trip between Long Island and Manhattan takes on the thunderous intensity of a Grand Prix; the mere arrival of Gatsby's gorgeous yellow Duesenberg in Nick Carraway's driveway is enough to set teacups rattling on a kitchen shelf. (Nick, the novel's narrator and aspiring writer, is played by Tobey Maguire.) Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, a desolate strip half way between West Egg and New York City, has become an expressionist Hades where doomed workers slave away on giant slag heaps. (That's as close as the movie comes to the author's complex attitude toward American capitalism.)
The artistic elephantiasis takes many forms. When young James Gatz, who hasn't yet transformed himself into Jay Gatsby, first encounters his benefactor-to-be,
Dan Cody, he doesn't just row a borrowed rowboat out to Cody's yacht on Lake Superior, as in the book; Gatz saves Cody and his vessel from incipient calamity during a storm of sufficient ferocity to scuttle the Titanic. And when the camera first catches sight of the fully formed Gatsby, presiding like a god over one of his parties, fireworks fill the summer sky behind him and a symphony orchestra summons up the majestic strains of 'Rhapsody in Blue.'
It's a moment that makes you smile, even if you recall that Woody Allen used Gershwin's anthem, and fireworks, to far greater effect in the preface of 'Manhattan.' There's something touching -- again, for a while -- in the filmmaker's desire to please, in his fevered efforts to define a time in American history by the way it looks. (He's so eager to cram in pieces of period detail that one camera pullback reveals high-steel workers constructing a skyscraper, even though it's the middle of the night.) But many of the borrowings -- from Busby Berkeley, from 'The Crowd, ' from 'Citizen Kane' -- begin to ring hollow, especially because Mr. Luhrmann borrows, well beyond the point of self-parody, from the same bag of tricks he opened up more than a decade ago in 'Moulin Rouge!'
The problem isn't those tricks per se. When the camera swoops and darts ecstatically, or in this case plummets into Manhattan's stone canyons, the effect can be impressive, never mind that Spider-Man has claimed such aerobatics for his own. One fleeting but striking image is that of an apartment building, with each window expanding or contracting, like a window on the screen of a giant computer, as it frames a half-seen life.
Nor is the music problematic, notwithstanding the film's much-hyped use of hip-hop, or the presence of the rapper Jay-Z as one of the producers. In fact, the hip-hop is used judiciously; it kicks in mainly during party scenes, when there's monstrous pounding from other sources, and it's no more intrusive than all the other efforts to heighten the story's reality. (The screenplay is credited to Mr. Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. Catherine Martin designed the lustrous production and the stunning costumes. Simon Duggan did the cinematography, which seemed of variable quality at the studio screening I attended.)
What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul. For all of its glittery fragmentation, 'Moulin Rouge!' came around to moments of genuine passion. None of these new trappings means a thing because the people who populate them are stylish sticks, unsinged by the spark of life.
That's almost surely not the fault of the actors, for the director turns them into lifelike props. Mr. DiCaprio, who's no more comfortable with the phrase 'old sport' than Robert Redford was in the previous version, is elaborately sincere when he isn't frowning like Jack Nicholson; being charming like, well, Leonardo DiCaprio, or being mysterious, except that people who are genuinely mysterious don't look mysterious. Carey Mulligan's Daisy is either languorous or amorous, not a lot in between. Mr. Maguire's Nick is cheerlessly impressionable. Joel Edgerton's Tom is charmlessly brutish. Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker is a flouncing cipher. And Mr. Luhrmann uses Amitabh Bachchan, a legendary star in his native India, to make the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem a leering Fagin.
Given the lifelessness of the enterprise, there's little point in belaboring its failure to convey the novel's themes, let alone the emotional and social resonance of what has come to be considered a masterpiece of world literature. Although the hero created himself out of the whole cloth of romantic yearning, we see almost nothing of that self-creation, only the conflicted result. Although the Nick of the novel arrives at a new and tragic understanding of the American Dream, the Nick on screen can't be more than an earnest observer, since any vestige of the story's tragic sense has been replaced by melodramatic sadness.
This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote 'The Great Gatsby' while living on Long Island and in Europe. In a deviation from the book that amounts to a calumny against literary history, Nick, the author's surrogate, is discovered in a psychiatric hospital where, as an aging alcoholic, he struggles to comprehend the vanished figure at the center of the long-ago story, and finally completes his treatment by writing the novel. It's literature as therapy, and Gatsby as Rosebud.