Gatsby Gatsby Gatsby
When my friend Max was a junior in high school, he called me up and said he had had to read The Great Gatsby and . . . he hated it!
Here is what Max said:
A thoughtless person reading Gatsby would conclude that people with money are fake and live superficial lives, doing whatever they want because they are rich, that they are careless and insensitive and egotistical—whether they be old money or nouveau riche. Fitzgerald gives us a stereotype and it is awful. Gatsby himself is a giant joke and a liar. Nick Carraway is a well-educated but unreliable narrator, who—despite the opening lines with his father’s advice not to judge people—judges everyone. And anyway this is not a profound idea. The last line—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”—is a cheap ending. Fitzgerald is a scoundrel. He takes cheap shots at the American Dream saying oh well sure you are rich but are you really living? Of course they are living! The idea that if you are rich you can’t be happy is something that comes from envious people who want to be rich but can’t and this upsets them so they say nasty things about the upper class. The book is a joke. Awful propaganda. Just plain wrong.
Max was—and is—capable of taking on the entire literary establishment . . . and winning!
Since I had always thought the novel was just high-gloss melodrama, I was delighted with Max’s take-no-prisoners assault.
The novel does have one truly great line. Jordan Baker says: “Anyhow, he gives large parties. And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” This remark is worthy of (the often underestimated) Oscar Wilde: while appearing to be just a clever bon mot, it is a deep and useful insight.
But aside from that one line, the novel is forgettable.
Nick says Gatsby “represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn.”
But immediately after that he says: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
The next line is: “No Gatsby turned out all right at the end . . . .”
Much later he says to Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd. . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
Are any of these (sometimes contradictory) statements true? There is no evidence to support them.
Since Nick (and Fitzgerald) is not being ironic, there can be only one explanation: Nick is gay, finds Gatsby gorgeous and irresistible, and has fallen madly in love with him. He knows down deep that Gatsby is a shallow poseur—thus the “unaffected scorn”—but he is so in love with him that he throws all caution to the wind.
In Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954), Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), like Tom and Daisy, is a careless rich person. But after he causes a tragedy, he feels remorse for the harm he has done to Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman)—with whom he falls in love—and devotes his life to curing her blindness. His obsession is indeed magnificent.
Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy. But his obsession is not magnificent. It is pathetic.
Fitzgerald did write at least one great novel: The Last Tycoon. And it was made into a truly great film by director Elia Kazan—aided by great acting (particularly by Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell), a first-rate script by Harold Pinter, and a beautiful score by Maurice Jarre.
But The Great Gatsby does not measure up. Of course sometimes a so-so novel can be transformed into a great film. François Truffaut made Shoot the Piano Player from Down There by David Goodis. Hitchcock’s The Birds was based on a thin short story by Daphne Du Maurier. There have been quite a number of films made of The Great Gatsby. Let’s look at three of them and see how they stack up.
Jack Clayton directed the 1974 version with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston. Farrow’s Daisy is just right: glittery with nervous energy but not quite there for anyone. You can see how Gatsby as an inexperienced young man could have become foolishly enchanted with her. Karen Black steals the show with her perfect Myrtle Wilson: so vulnerable and intense and sexy you want to jump into the screen and kiss her all over.
In the 2000 version, director Robert Markowitz is uninspired and so Daisy (Mira Sorvino), Gatsby (Toby Stephens), and Nick (Paul Rudd) never come to life. They seem to be sleepwalking.
But neither version succeeds. They make two fundamental mistakes. They believe the novel is un objet sacré that must be faithfully recreated. And they both present Gatsby as a tragic and heroic figure.
I went to the Baz Luhrmann version (2013) expecting much the same . . . but was pleasantly surprised.
Luhrmann uses the novel as raw material and gives us a Gatsby liberated from itself.
The first half is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of supersaturated intensity. New York as an explosion of wildness: wild parties at Gatsby’s, wild car rides, and a camera that wildly zooms in and wildly zooms out.
And the music! Luhrmann—freed from any belief that he must use only music from the 20s—makes inspired choices that include songs from today. Here are some of them:
Sia: Kill and Run
Lana del Rey: Young and Beautiful
Coco O. of Quadron: Where the Wind Blows
The Bryan Ferry Orchestra: Love Is the Drug
The xx: Together
Gotye: Hearts a Mess
Jelly Roll Morton: Monrovia
Florence + the Machine: Over the Love
Emeli Sandé and the Bryan Ferry Orchestra: Crazy in Love
All of these are in minor mode, which adds depth and a tinge of loneliness—even at the frenzied parties.
Gatsby shuts down these parties and we move into a quieter moodier second half. This is when we realize that the tragedy is not that Gatsby doesn’t get the girl but that he has spent his whole life trying to win back someone who is empty and mercurial.
The very thing that makes Luhrmann “wrong” is what makes him right: he doesn’t sanctify the love story. He gives us the right interpretation of The Great Gatsby: as a cautionary tale. And doubly so:
1 Nick, in love with Gatsby, writes a story for himself that Gatsby is a sensitive poetic soul when in fact Gatsby is shallow and selfish.
2 Gatsby, dazzled by Daisy, becomes obsessed with her and cannot see she is quite ordinary.
The lesson: we can’t help falling in love but we should realize the truth of that old cliché: all that glitters is not gold.
In addition, the film has beautiful quiet moments rich in feeling.
Baz Luhrmann does not have the magic of the truly gifted directors. But do not be blinded by his over-the-top white-hot intensity into thinking his film is superficial. He comes a lot closer than anyone else to giving us a great Gatsby.
And so in summary:
The Great Gatsby (1974) C
The Great Gatsby (2000) D
The Great Gatsby (2013) B
Hey Max: I think you will like the Baz Luhrmann version. But bring your blow torch just in case!
© Richard Hobby
I became enchanted with movies when I was very young. I have seen thousands of them in my quest to find films of intelligence and heart. I was chairman of the Oberlin College film society. I carried Pauline Kael in my arms across the mud at the Cleveland Airport. After teaching English at Tunghai University in Taiwan I returned to America and acted off-Broadway with Spalding Gray. I was the film critic at ArtWeek in San Francisco and went on to write about film for The Boston Globe and Maine Public Radio.
I recently re-read Gatsby by listening to it. My favorite passage - brilliant observational satire disguised as a guest list.
"From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
"Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.
"From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly—they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
"A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder”—I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewers and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
"Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names—Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
"In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
"All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer."