Quick -- name a seed you put in the garage.
Caraway. Get it? I don't know who said that the pun was the lowest form of humor but obviously he wasn't a fan of the London Times Crossword.
They keep trying to make a decent movie out of this wonderful novel and they haven't got it right yet.
Robert Redford's performance is up to par, nicely restrained, which the part calls for, but he looks fine, too fine. Gatsby, the arriviste, ought to have more of an edge to him. Redford seems to the manner born. Mia Farrow is simply miscast. Daisy should be someone who is all aflutter but a pretty tough and careless cookie underneath all that vulnerability. Farrow is simply shaky and nervous. And she's not breathtakingly beautiful enough to persist in someone's memory for so many years, although she's often photographed through a lens that seems to have a leg of someone's stocking stretched over it, so her image is almost gooey at times. Bruce Dern is a reliable actor, never failing to be interesting, but here again Tom should be something of a muscular brute and Dern is tall and thin. Rather than being naturally and unthinkingly commanding he seems to be nasty. Sam Waterston does a fine job as Nick Carraway, the narrator used to maintaining his distance from others and reluctant to exercise judgment upon them. He fits the novel's image well and this is undoubtedly one of his better performances. Lois Childs as the fraud Jordan is gorgeous but has difficulty uttering a believable sentence. Karen Black is suitably slutty as Myrtle. (Two great contrasting names: Daisy and Myrtle. Which is the elegant flower and which the vulgar growth?)
Waterston as Nick is given occasional voiceovers which almost capture Fitzgerald's impressionistic tropes. The film begins with one of them. And includes another -- "In his blue gardens, the men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars." But for considerations of space it leaves out one of the best-known last lines in American literature. ("And so we beat on...")
And for the same reason the movie must be cluttered with expository lines, since we can't read the passages between dialog while watching the screen. Thus, when Nick visits Tom for the first time in the novel, Tom stands with his legs apart at the top of the steps, waiting for Nick to climb to him, then puts an authoritative arm around his shoulders. Tom's first line: "I've got a nice place here." (That tells us a hell of a lot about Tom.) In the film, Tom rides up with a big grin in his polo outfit and greets Nick who is climbing out of a boat. Many friendly lines of greeting and explanation are involved, all of which necessarily detracts from the muscular impact of Tom's presence.
And Clayton (a talented director) doesn't even try to reproduce the surreal effect of Nick and Tom entering the mansion's living room where Daisy and Jordan are balancing imaginary objects on their chins and the breeze is blowing the filmy curtain up against the ceiling and the whole enclosure is compared to a frosted cake with icing on it. How COULD Clayton reproduce it? How could ANYBODY?
Also missing is the garden party scene in which Nick meets Gatsby for the first time. Nick finds himself sitting next to "a man of about my own age" and they begin chatting and Nick asks if he has met their host, Gatsby. And the other looks at him curiously and says, "Why, I'm Gatsby, old sport." The main character is edged sideways into the novel. In the movie Gatsby simply sends for Nick and says, "Hello, old sport. I'm Gatsby." The somewhat cattycorner succession of events is rendered flatly, without any of the pilomotor response induced by the written word. I won't go on with the bellyaches that come from Wolfsheim's accent -- the Oggsford Gonnegtion. "You've heard of Oggsford College?"
Other symbolic points retained from the novel include Nick's realization, while sitting with the others in a room at the Plaza, that today is his birthday -- he's thirty years old. Thirty. A milestone. An age at which we can no longer easily think of ourselves as "young." An age at which people should be able to not simply accept others but to make moral judgments about themselves and those around them. And for the first time, Nick makes that sort of judgment -- about Gatsby, and about Tom and Daisy.
In the novel, when Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in years, at Nick's cottage, Gatsby nervously leans against the mantle and has a duel of wits with the clock there, almost knocking it down, as if fighting it, willing time to run backwards. In the movie he simply bangs against it.
I first read this novel in high school and was unimpressed with it. Neither were very many other people at the time; Fitzgerald's rep was at low ebb. Then, years later, due to circumstances I won't bother to explain, I found myself stuck on a Cheyenne Indian reservation in Montana for a summer with practically nothing else to read. That second reading was a revelation. I've since used it as required ancillary reading in classes I've taught on Social Stratification, although that part of it is a bit dated now. It just seemed a good excuse to introduce students to a literary work they might never forget. It's not a long novel, but it's beautifully done. I urge you to read it if you haven't yet. But see the movie first, so you won't unfairly compare it to the novel which will still be ringing along your synapses.
Caraway. Get it? I don't know who said that the pun was the lowest form of humor but obviously he wasn't a fan of the London Times Crossword.
They keep trying to make a decent movie out of this wonderful novel and they haven't got it right yet.
Robert Redford's performance is up to par, nicely restrained, which the part calls for, but he looks fine, too fine. Gatsby, the arriviste, ought to have more of an edge to him. Redford seems to the manner born. Mia Farrow is simply miscast. Daisy should be someone who is all aflutter but a pretty tough and careless cookie underneath all that vulnerability. Farrow is simply shaky and nervous. And she's not breathtakingly beautiful enough to persist in someone's memory for so many years, although she's often photographed through a lens that seems to have a leg of someone's stocking stretched over it, so her image is almost gooey at times. Bruce Dern is a reliable actor, never failing to be interesting, but here again Tom should be something of a muscular brute and Dern is tall and thin. Rather than being naturally and unthinkingly commanding he seems to be nasty. Sam Waterston does a fine job as Nick Carraway, the narrator used to maintaining his distance from others and reluctant to exercise judgment upon them. He fits the novel's image well and this is undoubtedly one of his better performances. Lois Childs as the fraud Jordan is gorgeous but has difficulty uttering a believable sentence. Karen Black is suitably slutty as Myrtle. (Two great contrasting names: Daisy and Myrtle. Which is the elegant flower and which the vulgar growth?)
Waterston as Nick is given occasional voiceovers which almost capture Fitzgerald's impressionistic tropes. The film begins with one of them. And includes another -- "In his blue gardens, the men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars." But for considerations of space it leaves out one of the best-known last lines in American literature. ("And so we beat on...")
And for the same reason the movie must be cluttered with expository lines, since we can't read the passages between dialog while watching the screen. Thus, when Nick visits Tom for the first time in the novel, Tom stands with his legs apart at the top of the steps, waiting for Nick to climb to him, then puts an authoritative arm around his shoulders. Tom's first line: "I've got a nice place here." (That tells us a hell of a lot about Tom.) In the film, Tom rides up with a big grin in his polo outfit and greets Nick who is climbing out of a boat. Many friendly lines of greeting and explanation are involved, all of which necessarily detracts from the muscular impact of Tom's presence.
And Clayton (a talented director) doesn't even try to reproduce the surreal effect of Nick and Tom entering the mansion's living room where Daisy and Jordan are balancing imaginary objects on their chins and the breeze is blowing the filmy curtain up against the ceiling and the whole enclosure is compared to a frosted cake with icing on it. How COULD Clayton reproduce it? How could ANYBODY?
Also missing is the garden party scene in which Nick meets Gatsby for the first time. Nick finds himself sitting next to "a man of about my own age" and they begin chatting and Nick asks if he has met their host, Gatsby. And the other looks at him curiously and says, "Why, I'm Gatsby, old sport." The main character is edged sideways into the novel. In the movie Gatsby simply sends for Nick and says, "Hello, old sport. I'm Gatsby." The somewhat cattycorner succession of events is rendered flatly, without any of the pilomotor response induced by the written word. I won't go on with the bellyaches that come from Wolfsheim's accent -- the Oggsford Gonnegtion. "You've heard of Oggsford College?"
Other symbolic points retained from the novel include Nick's realization, while sitting with the others in a room at the Plaza, that today is his birthday -- he's thirty years old. Thirty. A milestone. An age at which we can no longer easily think of ourselves as "young." An age at which people should be able to not simply accept others but to make moral judgments about themselves and those around them. And for the first time, Nick makes that sort of judgment -- about Gatsby, and about Tom and Daisy.
In the novel, when Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time in years, at Nick's cottage, Gatsby nervously leans against the mantle and has a duel of wits with the clock there, almost knocking it down, as if fighting it, willing time to run backwards. In the movie he simply bangs against it.
I first read this novel in high school and was unimpressed with it. Neither were very many other people at the time; Fitzgerald's rep was at low ebb. Then, years later, due to circumstances I won't bother to explain, I found myself stuck on a Cheyenne Indian reservation in Montana for a summer with practically nothing else to read. That second reading was a revelation. I've since used it as required ancillary reading in classes I've taught on Social Stratification, although that part of it is a bit dated now. It just seemed a good excuse to introduce students to a literary work they might never forget. It's not a long novel, but it's beautifully done. I urge you to read it if you haven't yet. But see the movie first, so you won't unfairly compare it to the novel which will still be ringing along your synapses.