Sunday Review: The Great Gatsby

The Ungreat Gatsby: A failed attempt to transmit literature to film

By Jonathan Price

Why does anyone want to do yet another film version of one of the great American novels of the twentieth century? The answer, I suppose, is the same as why anyone tries to climb mountains: because they are there. Actually, despite the relatively small fatality rate, there is far more repeat success climbing mountains than there is any significant success turning great literature into even moderately successful or satisfying films. In fact, the effort is littered with the near-dead bodies of failed attempts at great fiction-to-film transformations.
    Melville’s Moby Dick? Often thought to be the great American novel of the twentieth century—an eminently forgotten attempt starring Gregory Peck. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, with its title taken from one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, a great modernist icon and a difficult but profound text on which many a high school student and legions of college English majors have cut their teeth? An embarrassing version starring Yul Brynner as the moral hero Jason Compson (who in the novel is pathetic, misogynistic, unbrotherly, selfish, mean-minded—an unimaginative, supremely comic figure). Faulkner produced six novels labeled masterpieces by literary critics out of the twenty plus he wrote, but the only fictions he constructed that were even moderately successful in film were Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers. These were not among the key six. What about Ernest Hemingway, one of the most popular critically acclaimed American novelists and so well known he was a media star as well as a skilled writer whose transformational style imprinted itself on so much of the fiction written in the years since 1920? His three great novels The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls have yielded not a single film worth ordering from Netflix. James Joyce? Two cinematic versions of Ulysses, but neither particularly celebrated as of this date. Marcel Proust? Forgedaboutit, s’il vous plait.

Given these precipitous heights to scale, why does anyone try? Because, of course, they do. There have been four cinematic (or TV) versions to date of The Great Gatsby—the current Baz Luhrmann version, a silent version from the ’20s just after the novel’s publication, the ’70s version with Robert Redford (which many current viewers remember, but not particularly favorably), and one television version. Of course, films are narratives with characters, and most novels are narratives with characters. Also, as major film corporations I’m sure know, there is a built-in backlog of potential viewers who have read the book or remember it and want to see its film translation; or, correspondingly a large number of those who have heard about it and think they should read it, and will take the easy way out and just go to a two-hour film instead. But the rule of thumb, with many noteworthy exceptions, remains: the more sophisticated, the more perceptive and well-written the novel, the worse the film. And vice versa. The Godfather is a truly great film based on a mediocre novel by a potentially talented writer; this is a significant comparison, since the Coppola film version tells yet another story of failed (and sympathetic) American Dreamers such as Fitzgerald aimed for in The Great Gatsby; but Coppola manages to do it cinematically, adding depth with his use of light and dark, paired and subtle images, and powerful, disturbing scenes.
    But film-novel translations are pretty much destined to fail for several reasons. One of the key questions asked by the innocent viewer and sometimes by the reviewer is: Is the film a faithful rendition of the novel? But this question begs the essential question: how do you transform a group of words organized into sentences, periods, paragraphs, and chapters to be read and savored over several sittings, into a visual spectacle with a particular rhythm that depends primarily on images? The only way to be “faithful” would be to place a movie camera in front of the text and photograph the pages slowly as they are turned, one by one. As one may suspect, barring an Andy Warhol version, this method is unlikely to produce any enthusiastic responses. After all, this cry for fidelity to the text is not a fair demand; since the two, novel and film, are radically different art forms, perhaps no more alike than a piano sonata and an oil painting, despite surface similarities.

Having uttered this critical pronunciamento, conscience forces me to concede there have been notable exceptions where fiction has been made into adequate or superb films. Ken Russell’s film version of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is a superb, powerful, and imaginative film. Virtually the entire Merchant-Ivory corpus transforming nineteenth and twentieth century fiction into celluloid has been successful. And despite his own lamentable failures in drama, Henry James has had some success in the film versions of Portrait of a Lady and Wings of the Dove.
    Inevitably the text of a novel must be adapted, which in the case of most novels, means radically amputated—trimmed of incident and character—since the typical short story of thirty pages offers sufficient narrative drive for a feature film. But a 300-page novel is ten times that length: here Gatsby might seem a more appealing subject, since its published versions usually run only 180 pages. One of the passages inevitably excluded from film versions of Gatsby is the catalog of Gatsby’s guests that Nick records for us on three pages of the novel, a punning comic set piece of American sociology and morality and economic history that is a delight to read, but clearly untranslatable; e.g.,

S.B. Whitebait…and the Hammerheads and Beluga the tobacco importer…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.

It is hard to make up for the omission of this great set piece with overhead CGI views of Manhattan and Long Island or with orgiastic and redundant party pieces and telescoping lenses.

The other problem a screenwriter-director faces in dealing with great literature is that each choice is subjected by the aficionado (or even the reader) to a heart-rending scrutiny, since it is almost inevitably a change from the text, or—more prominently—from that image carried in the reader’s mind and imagination. As a reader and long-term teacher of The Great Gatsby, I experienced these near-inevitable disappointments in the Luhrmann film I just saw. Perhaps the most prominent is in the role and placement of Toby Maguire as Nick, for the film Nick is explained as our typical mad narrator, recovering from his experience of Gatsby and his era in a sanatorium in the Midwest, where a doctor prescribes literarytherapy. This Nick is a far cry from the voice of the novel, who is mature, sophisticated, distant enough to be admired, sympathetic and involved enough to be credible and moving—but hardly sounding like a compromised individual with a mental or a drinking problem. Fitzgerald’s Nick is a lot more like Melville’s Ishmael, who escapes the tragedy of the hunt for the White Whale, than a “mad narrator” like Humbert Humbert of Lolita. The Luhrman choice of a mad narrator is more reminiscent of American novels of the 50s and 60s with such equivocal viewpoint characters as Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, telling us his story from a sanatorium in California, or Randall McMurphy, institutionalized in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Perhaps Luhrmann is thinking of Holden, who is an avowed admirer of Gatsby.
    This dislocation of the novelistic narrator Nick also means the truncation of beautiful passages that deftly analyze the deterioration of the American dream, when Nick-Fitzgerald compares Gatsby looking across at Daisy’s house to the Dutch sailor “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” In the film, we don’t see Nick’s dissociation from the East and retreat to the Midwest as a moral move but as the last refuge of a destitute alcoholic—even though this latter may track more accurately the trajectory of Fitzgerald’s own later years. The morality of Nick’s detachment in the novel is underlined by connection to passages and events which are excised from the film: his several key discussions with Jordan Baker about “careless drivers” and his eventual breakup with her because he connects her to the amorality and lack of judgment surrounding Daisy and Tom. Nevertheless, the power of Nick’s language is imaginatively underlined on the screen when words issue from his journal and conversation and are highlighted over the visuals, as if in a Brecht play.

Equally problematic are the inevitable incarnations of characters such as Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby himself. Leonardo DiCaprio seems to me a more convincing Gatsby than I might have expected—mature, self-possessed, yet a little uncertain, and very debonair in his pink suit. But his only sense of mystery occurs when he looks pouty or angry, which supposedly is a revelation of depth or disappointment. The problem is that essentially Gatsby is a mysterious, near-contradictory character in the novel who begins as myth with a few snippets of conversation, may have been related to the Kaiser, is very personable and has a great smile, has a supreme romantic fascination with Daisy that is so intense it transcends personality and character and history, and even has the background of a millionaire whose money comes from bootlegging. It’s hard for any single person, let alone an actor in brief moments over the course of two hours, to get this across. It works much better in a fiction that gradually develops these subtle and contradictory details about Gatsby over 180 pages and embeds them in a prose which transform Gatsby into the ur-American as well as Jesus Christ and a gangster all at once. DiCaprio’s first smile at Toby Maguire is ingratiating, but how can that smile, or anyone’s smile fully embody the description Nick-Fitzgerald offers of “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life....It believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself…Precisely at that point it vanished”? Perhaps Gatsby’s attraction is emblemized well in both novel and on screen when Tobey Maguire says meaningfully in farewell to him, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
    Daisy is almost an inevitable disappointment in her screen versions, either by Mia Farrow or Carey Mulligan. But I doubt any real woman can embody such a vision that promises all that Daisy promises to Gatsby, is attractive enough to every viewer, and yet is somehow subtly insincere, meretricious, disappointing. At some level, despite its great range and potential, I suspect Fitzgerald’s literary vision is simply not cinematic. This is not a fault, but it certainly frustrates Luhrmann. His film does not have the resonance the novel does, in its analysis of the underlying themes of American culture, its bondage to wealth, and its amoral self-deceptions. In fact, Gatsby’s parties, a kind of nouveau-riche enactment of the gospel of wealth, are extravaganzas of stage production in the film that are ultimately gaudy and silly, some with oddly anachronistic hip-hop lyrics. Still the scene where Gatsby flaunts around his magnificent mansion showing Daisy his acquisitions and eventually tossing her down elegant shirts is wonderful, so many shirts that it’s as if the interior is that of the Ralph Lauren emporium in Manhattan. The demonstration is both exhibitionist and somehow sexy and works on Daisy as it works on the viewer.

Despite its failures, the film still gets a lot right in powerful sequences: the billowing white curtains that first introduce us to Daisy and Tom and Jordan; the slag heaps of the Valley of Ashes that abut Manhattan and the bedroom communities of East and West Egg and reveal the underside of the American dream of success (along with an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”); the disembodied spectacles of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that hover over the landscape and punningly suggest a vanished God and appear on the 1925 cover for the novel; the murder of Gatsby as he falls, deluded and unaware, into his San Simeon-like pool, shot by Wilson, who is jealous of the wrong man.
    In the end, the current film version functions as a great vehicle to advertise new Gatsby-era fashions and retro diamonds from Tiffany’s, but tells us very little about Fitzgerald or Daisy or Gatsby or the vanishing American dream.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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