Great Gatsby, The
Great Gatsby, The
May 24, 2013
Dear Hank,
Saw The Great Gatsby last night, the latest reincarnation in movie form with Leo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire and music by Jay Z. I was prepared to not like it, to hate it even. Why put rap music into something about the Jazz Age? It had also been shot in 3D. Why? I saw no point to either. I did see it in regular 2D.
Rolling Stone panned it (“Summer’s Epic Fail”), reinforcing all my preconceived prejudices about the movie from the tidbits I had collected. Then earlier this week I was in a used bookstore in Pittsboro, North Carolina and I was talking to the fellow running the store. He had the soundtrack playing, had seen the movie in 2D the night before. He was going back to see it in 3D that night. He said the film stuck to the story very well. I had heard that they had the narrator, Nick Carraway, reminiscing years later in a sanitarium. That seemed out of character to me. Yeah, he said but that was just to get the story going. Look at it as a piece of art in itself he said. Remember that it’s Hollywood.
Another friend had seen it and said it was long.
We went. We saw. It was fabulous.
The music of Jay Z? Perfect, used to set the tone of the parties at Gatsby’s house. It was that slow booming syncopated rap used with a slight slo-mo effect to show the big parties as an organic whole - pulsating.
The fact that the story was set with Nick Carraway, the narrator, in a sanitarium years later looking back? No problem. One can argue that he was the only sane one in the bunch so it seems odd he’d be in a sanitarium, but I would say that Nick was in reality F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald had a terrible time with alcohol. He came out of his fog long enough to write The Great Gatsby and then fell back into it. His wife, Zelda, was committed - several times. So, no, I had no problem with the premise.
Were there minor things that seemed out of character from the novel? Yes, but they were minor, and there were several nice touches. Klipspringer played an organ in the movie; wasn’t it a piano in the book? But on the organ were his shoes; the ones he called about at the end of the book. He had forgotten them and was hoping Nick could send them on along. Wolfsheim seemed more Arab than Jewish, younger than I expected, and better looking; but that lent an edge to the scenes with him.
There were several scenes that for me helped make the novel more dramatic and clarified the action in the book: the confrontation at the Plaza being the most notable. But the plot of the book is really a backdrop to the real story, the thing that makes The Great Gatsby an American Classic; a book you can go back to time and time again. The themes are universal: great wealth set against great poverty, success at a price, inability to care, the American god, try-try-try again and fail - but still see the good (sisyphus with a twist?)
I had read it in school and missed so much. I had reread and studied it earlier this year for my own writing. Daisy as light and airy. Tom as physically strong and manhandling people, especially Nick, and taking the air out of a room - literally, and deflating any conversation with his racist and inappropriate remarks. Fitzgerald used light and air in his descriptions to frame these two so well. He used the vast wasteland and the eyeglasses on the billboard along with the ashes and the dust to show the down and out side of America, the desperate and the poor; as George Wilson the auto mechanic was. The only thing he had was his wife and the hope that Tom would sell him a car. Fitzgerald used the same elements such as light, air, and wind to illuminate a setting and to reflect a person’s character. When Nick meets Daisy for the first time in the book the room is light breezy and dazzling white. The curtains are blowing in the wind. Tom immediately closes the windows and all the breeze leaves the room. The movie does and other scenes using blowing curtains this with a Broadway panache.
The Great Gatsby is the only book that had a cover commissioned by the author’s editor (the great Maxwell Perkins) from an artist before the book was done. Not just any artist, one that had done many posters for Hollywood movies. Fitzgerald changed parts of the story to fit the artwork; especially the description of the billboard and the glasses. The first run of the book: 20,870 copies priced at $2.00 sold out. The year was 1925. The second run of 3,000 copies did not sell out in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It was only his death in 1940 that moved them all out of the warehouse. The third run of 260 copies was done to make the novel available to the few who wanted it. It was Perkins who planned a volume of collected works. This led to a revival in the fifties and a student edition in 1957. From there it took off into literary history.
I sat in the theater half way through the movie and wondered what would Scott Fitzgerald think if he were sitting here watching this? I’m sure he’d have niggling differences (He was rewriting the galleys even as the book went to press.) Overall I’d bet he’d be pleased and in wonder.
In a way the book has come full circle. It got a boost at its beginning from Hollywood, so to speak, and here it is with a great glitzy revival that does it justice.
Any qualms? Let’s see. DiCaprio was very good as Gatsby; so was McQuire as Nick Carraway. The fellow playing Tom Buchanan was okay, not great. Not brutish enough. The woman playing daisy’s friend, the golfer, Jordan Baker, was good. I think they reduced her part somewhat in the movie so she didn’t play as pivotal a role, but her role was minor in the novel too. The weakest for me was the woman who played Daisy. I think Mia Farrow did a better job in the 1970’s version. To me Daisy was light, airy, frivolous, and unwilling to commit to anything; living a life put upon her, and not of her choosing because she did not decide or speak up for herself. The actress, Carey Mulligan, captured some of those things but not all of them and not with enough whatever you want to call it, but this is minor minor minor stuff. She and the director and writers captured the essence of Daisy Buchanan.
Now I want to go see it in 3D.
Gotta go,
the B man
posted by Rick Kinnaird at 6:52 AM
0 comments
