The Great Gatsby

Well,it is by now the best version of Gatsby,and I've seen three of the total four(all except the 1926 version,anyway unobtainable today). I think this one came closest to the original novel,yet much different from the original Fitzgerald novel-which,by the way is one of the best,if not the absolute best American novel ever to be written. The settings,music,original quotes,the acting are accurate only up to a certain point,a careful viewer discovering many inaccurate details if the film is compared to the book-Bruce Dern doesn't resemble Tom Buchanan at all,the actual Tom Buchanan being either a hulking brute(Oliver Reed or James Garner fitting much more accurately into that description,with their animal,macho-like physical structure,Reed's character from Women in Love even being a rich heir and playboy,a careless,spoiled,selfish,snobbish,hollowly narrow-minded and depraved bully)or an inexpressively beautiful all-American WASP,the cute,unimaginative,well-educated,dull,and again snobbish boy next door(even Redford could have been more convincing as Tom Buchanan:both more convincing as Dern and more convincing than his performance of Gatsby),Gatsby's Rolls-Royce couldn't have been a 1922 car because in the film we see a Rolls-Royce Corniche from 1925,actually the events even take place in 1925,not in 1922 like in the book,since eight,not five years have elapsed since Gatsby's first date with Daisy back in 1917,Gatsby's house isn't the like the one depicted in the book,certainly not the copy of an old castle from the Normandie(for example Hearst Ranch,which stood as a model both for Fitzgerald as he described Gatsby's home and for Citizen Kane's Xanadu)would have been a good choice,Daisy's hair is not blonde but dark,while Jordan Baker actually is blond,while she isn't blond in this film.... and the list of mistaken details might continue. Nevertheless,in spite of all the flaws mentioned above,the film still captures the enthralling beauty of the roaring twenties,being visually lush-the rich colors,textures,images used are so lavish,so lush,so intense that they almost seem disturbing.The costumes are stylish and extravagantly elegant,the music is authentic jazz and makes you want to get up and dance the Charleston. But some of the actors are clearly miscast,including Redford in the title role(which he even copies two decades later in Indecent Proposal,where he appears as an unhappy,mysterious billionaire craving to re-live the love lost in his shady past and willing to pay every price for it,thinking that his money and power could buy anything and anyone).Robert Redford does a fairly good job as Gatsby,but is clearly not the best choice.Gatsby is actually more mysterious than the athletic sunny-boy Redford,maybe not even handsome,however far more charismatic,expressive,even more eccentric. Probably the only actor I could imagine as Gatsby would be Richard Chamberlain,which played the best version of The Count of Monte Cristo the same year and by far the most credible Fitzgerald biopic in the following year-Gatsby is actually a sort of Monte Cristo who reinvents himself,assumes a new name/identity,acquires and spends an immense fortune both to reconquer his lost love and to come to terms with his past.Gatsby could have been depicted in a darker way,as he made his Fortune by using shady means during Prohibition("he killed a man"...or more),an elegant character exhaling a somewhat impure,demonic,oddly compelling fascination,manipulating and vindictive,seducing,twisting everything he touches. While Mia Farrow's performance as Daisy lacks originality,style,beauty,chemistry,just about everything.It's incredible that among so many actresses contemporary to her who depicted the twenties's flapper in a convincing way-Laura Antonelli,Susan Hampshire,Julie Andrews,Brigitte Bardot,Karen Black,Glenda Jackson,Liza Minelli,Lois Chiles,Natalie Wood,Faye Dunaway(the last one unjust deprived of this part in this very movie)she was the best choice.However there is something that Mia Farrow does excellently in her portrayal of Daisy-she looks extremely superficial,careless,vapid,insensitively spoiled and incapable of being serious or reasonable for one single second. The supporting cast on the other hand somewhat balances the film's flaws:Sam Waterson is credible as a mature,reliable,discreet,modest,intelligent,trustworthy Nick Carraway,just like in the book,Karen Black and Lois Chiles are also fitting well into their roles,while Scott Wilson as the mentally troubled,yet pure husband of Tom's mistress,plays his haunting part so well,that he somewhat resembles Peter Seller's genius to depict haunting,neurotic characters(Sellers would have been right for this part too). All in all this film is pleasant to watch and entertaining,but not Jack Clayton's ultimate masterpiece-is first watched it I was seduced by its visual splendor,watching it several times again,it gradually lost the magic I remembered.

Looking as if it were plucked from the dreaming ear of an impressionable adolescent with Fitzgerald's novel half-open on his bedstand -- and sometimes sounding, alas, as if it were scored by the guy who did episode #93 of Kojak -- there is no reason why this 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby shouldn't be better regarded than it is, or even included among other masterpieces of the fertile period. Well, maybe one: Mia Farrow gives an execrable, vaporish performance as Daisy Buchanan that will make you get down on your knees and thank god that we only have to deal with Gwyneth Paltrow. In a way, though, even Farrow's neuroting fits, because this is Fitzgerald as seen through a Tennesee Williams filter. The character of Myrtle's husband, a cipher in the book, is here a sweaty man in overalls who squeezes an oily rag in his hand whenever he stresses out over his wife's infidelities, which is pretty much all the time. What we film folk might call the Karl Malden character.

Unbeknownst to many, this movie was written by Francis Ford Coppola, and is another crown jewel to add to his annus mirabilis of 1974, when he also wrote and directed The Conversation and The Godfather Part II. And what did you do last year? Here he does a wonderfully subtle job with a thankless task, excising most of the celebrated prose passages and too-famous scenes. There's nothing worse than seeing desperate actors try to bring tension to overly familiar texts -- I can never stifle a groan when any actor says "To be or not to be" -- unless of course it's doing reverent voiceovers of Great American Literature. Both of these fatal errors are mostly avoided, but for anyone who wishes the movie were more faithful, they retain the scene where Daisy weeps over Gatsby's shirts. This episode has an intuitive poetic psychology in the book, but goes over like a lead balloon on screen because we expect clearer motivation from flesh and blood people. Such are the limitations of film. But to keep himself interested, and to prevent the proceedings from feeling too dutiful, Coppola gives strange, heretical tweaks to his notorious source throughout, including an assassination scene that likens Gatsby, brilliantly, to JFK.

I don't know much about director Jack Clayton, except that he also did an ace adaptation of Turn of the Screw, retitled The Innocents... But maybe that's enough. This guy FEELS literature. Nothing in this movie looks less than how you idealized it -- even the sunsets are Jazz Age. Robert Redford, too, perhaps sensing he was born to play this role, doesn't fold under pressure but gives a shrewdly understated performance to match the underwritten character, somehow keeping the myth of Gatsby alive despite his all-too-solid presence. In the scene where we first meet him in his office, his solitude framed by the noises of the revellers down in the garden, he projects both neediness and the intimidating force field that comes with extreme wealth, seemingly without doing anything.

A reviewer below me wondered why the men in this movie would go for the shrill, plain women, and suggested there was a gay subtext. Cool. Then the casting of Mia Farrow is subversive instead of insane. I have to admit, when Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway tells Gatsby "You're better than the whole lot of 'em put together!" his delivery has something, shall we say, flamboyant about it, especially in comparison to his wooden restraint hitherto. It's almost as if he stored up all his energy for that one line, to force us to see what a key moment it is between these two young men, and perhaps what's lost when Gatsby meets his end later the same afternoon. But enough speculation. Here's a movie open to any and all interpretations -- sexual, political, poetical.

This version tries to stay very true to the roots of the story. It's greatest detriment is its lavish budget, made evident from scenery and costuming. Coppola does an admirable job with his script, but it is impossible to fail to realize that he borrowed heavily from the source material, often citing it verbatim. In this sense, the plot is very faithful to the novel. The film fails to recapture the feel, mood, and spirit of the novel and of the twenties. Fitzgerald made Gatsby a very personal character. For him, there was always something unattainable; and for Gatsby, it was Daisy, the lost love of his life, forever symbolized by a flashing green light at her dock.

When it doesn't try, the film captures the mood of the twenties. This is especially true during Gatsby's first party, showing people being themselves. The majority the cast, particularly Mia Farrow, and with the exception of Bruce Dern (Tom Buchanan) play their parts as if they were silent actors. Even the flickering quality of silent film seems to haunt this film stock. It goes without saying the acting was overdone for the most part. This is true of the essence of the characters and of the times, although in the film, it is overkill. The set decoration was visually pleasing and it effectively captured the mood of each scene and the twenties.

This film, more than anything else, is a scary attempt of a tribute. In the novel, the green light, and the T.J. Eckleburg sign had significant meanings. Stranded in the film, they remain merely stripped objects. The set seems to attempt to "fix" Fitzgerald's descriptions. Where in the book, Daisy and Tom Buchanan's home is very inviting, the film drowns in whites and yellows in the film.

Actors aren't exploited to its potential. Clayton fails to give us a relatable Gatsby, a crucial element to the novel. Redford could have played Gatsby very well. It's not his fault that he doesn't. When we are introduced to Gatsby, it's through a low-angle shot of a figure seen against the night sky, framed by marble. This isn't the quiet, unsure, romantic Gatsby on his doomed quest. This is the arrogant, loud and obnoxious Charles Kane, who knows he's rich and isn't shy about it. The scene where Gatsby symbolically reaches out to snatch the green light stays true to the book, but looks stupid on film.

Three essential scenes make the film seem even less credible. These are times where it is essential to portray Gatsby as the one we know and love from the novel. The first is the original meeting between Gatsby and Nick. Redford's inarticulate and formality with Nick is laughable. It's the first time we hear him talk, and he's so mannered that the acting upstages the content of the scene. Nick is supposed to be so relaxed he doesn't realize that he's talking to a millionaire. Changing the location of this scene from in the party to the office is the cause for this dramatic awkwardness. This has to have been Clayton's doing. This changes Gatsby's character, and he Gatsby isn't as sure of himself as the book had made us believe. Doesn't that have to be Clayton's fault? Using The Sting, Butch Cassidy and The Candidate as examples, we know Redford has enough versatility to play this scene several other, better ways. In the Gatsby and Daisy reunion (crucial moments to the picture) we see Gatsby's smiling and Daisy's stunned reaction held for so long, we wonder why Nick just doesn't go out and smoke one cigarette, come back, and go outside again to smoke another one. He'd go through a whole pack. Any tension we might have had has been fed to ridiculousness. The other plot cliché that further adds to this product of celluloid silliness is Gatsby's final scene. The way this is presented may work on stage and it certainly would work in a silent film, but here it is so hackneyed, so irreversibly awkward that any suspense is gone, and it looks silly.

The message of the novel, in my opinion, is that although Gatsby is a crook and has dealt with the likes of Meyer Wolfsheim, gamblers and bootleggers, he is still a romantic, naive, and heroic boy of the Midwest. His idealism is doomed in the confrontation with the Buchanan recklessness. This isn't clear in the movie.

We are told more than shown. The soundtrack contains Nick's narration, often verbatim from the novel. We don't feel much of what we're supposed to feel because of the overproduction and clichés. Even the actors seem somewhat shied away from their characters because of this. We can't figure out why Gatsby's so "Great", or why Gatsby thinks that Daisy is so special. Mia Farrow's portrayal of Daisy falls flat of the novel's description. The musical quality of her voice has been replaced with shrills, and her sophistication has been stripped of her complexity. This is extremely evident by her Clara Bow acting style in this picture, especially in the scene where Redford is throwing his shirts on the floor and she starts crying.

How could a screenplay that borrowed so much of Fitzgerald's novel be portrayed so inaccurately? When one reads a novel, it is up to the author to create his symbolisms from scratch. When a book is transformed into a film, the filmmakers must be sure to covey the symbols more than by merely showing them. They must still be carefully developed, whether by dialogue or more action. In the novel it works well. When translated to film symbolism is lost in translation.

As a film on its own, the technical qualities are excellent, and can be more than worth your while catching at least an hour's worth just for the scenery, costuming, and for the few great scenes that successfully convey the twenties.

So much for hoping for a special edition DVD of this undervalued movie. Not even a trailer! But at least the movie has never looked better, and the original music soundtrack has been fully restored, so I'm not about to complain any further. Ever since its release this film has been battered with wildly vicious criticisms. Maybe that can be better reserved for the genuinely numbing and off key 2001 TV version, which makes this version look better than ever. This version, to me, improves with every viewing--it's peculiar rhythms and deliberately sedate pace does work very well, creating a mood not easily comparable to other movies. Then too, look at director Jack Clayton's movie, THE INNOCENTS (1960), which shares a bit of this studied approach. I'm glad this Gatsby version wasn't reduced to a quick and vulgarized romp; instead Clayton took a more intellectual tone, very nicely counterpointed with a superb array of period music. The crowning touch, Irving Berlin's "What'll I Do," is a match made in heaven, both the song and the novel having appeared within a year of each other in 1925. As for the DVD, it now highlights to maximum effect the evocative, first rate cinematography and art direction (what were those other commentators thinking--were they watching a duped VHS?), etc. Too bad a 30th anniversary edition couldn't have happened in 2004, but I'm more than pleased this has been given its chance on DVD. I agree that the novel's literary aspects defies easy transformation into a movie, but we are more than fortunate that this 1974 film version is as haunting and quietly moving an experience that it is.

This adaptation may have worked with the mute button on, but the cheezy movie-of-the-week score, the shrill cries of Mia Farrow, and the pallid reading by Robert Redford doom this film. Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan makes as much sense as Jimmie 'J.J.' Walker as Muhammad Ali - the physical strength that defined Tom is totally missing.

The staging, costumes, and incidentals (cars, etc.) are gorgeous, but the beauty of Fitzgerald's prose is nowhere to be found. This must be a difficult work to film, and it shows.