Arwen Adams Bicknell

Well, I went to see the movie.  We’ve been a bunch of movie hounds this month: Iron Man 3, Gatsby, and today we are going to see Star Trek.  I rather suspect Gatsby will ring in at the bottom in terms of my preference for a second viewing.  Hardly surprising, I know.  But as promised, I picked it apart while I was watching it, so I’ll record my thoughts here.

Hits: I’m probably a tiny voice alone on this one, but I actually thought DiCaprio and Mulligan acquitted themselves nicely in this, and I thought they left Redford and Farrow in the dust.

Redford just seemed sort of wooden, as if loooong pauses and choppy speech made him mysterious. DiCaprio does a better job of adding that “something’s off” layer — that thing you recognize on all good liars, but can’t quite articulate.  The wrong note they hit in a casual sentence, a certain cock of the wrist — something you see from the corner of your eye but that disappears when you try to focus on it.  He overshoots in a couple places, but I even liked that — you can’t be a 100 percent successful fraud all the time, and where the actor isn’t, he could be doing it on purpose to help the audience out.

Mulligan likewise added a more nuanced view of her character.  Farrow always struck me as a hysterical dingbat — she got all the surface mannerisms of Daisy, but seemed to play her like that was all there was to her.  In Farrow’s hands, Daisy is a horrible person because she’s too stupid to know better and she’s pinballing around because she’s no more than a helpless female.  With Mulligan, we see that Daisy is a horrible person by choice. She’s shallow and careless and frivolous and cold because that is the persona she has cultivated. You can see she’s got a brain, and that there are motivations behind her actions. To me, this makes her an even more despicable person, because she does know better and goes ahead anyway.  (I admit, I also thought Farrow was kind of ugly to be playing the dazzling, amazing woman that inspired a fellow to pin his entire life’s course on her. It’s much easier to believe that of Mulligan.)

The other good thing about the movie is that it’s very pretty.  It’s Baz Luhrmann.  Of course it’s pretty.

The Misses:

It’s pretty.  Like I said in my last post, the novel wasn’t written as a glowing homage. You were supposed to see the decay setting in.  Luhrmann would have been better off adding touches here and there of Fitzgerald’s puritannical judgment of what was going on.  By the end of the movie, you should be able to see the circles under their eyes, some paint chipping off the porch railings, some dirt on the floor. You don’t.

Nick. Everything about Nick is wrong. Nick should get a lawyer and sue. I hated the rehab construct, partly because it was an annoying deviation from the book, partly because I thought it was a lazy, quick fix for all the pretty (his one nod to the party being over, rather than using small cues throughout the movie to show the party was ending). I hated the writing on the screen.  I hated Tobey Maguire’s monotone, and I hated that he acted like a dork.  Nick was not a dork.  We’ve all known a Nick, the guy who sits back and watches and absorbs and judges, the guy you trust implicitly because he’s smart and dependable and shows up when you need him and makes for a good moral compass.  This Nick sucks and needs a boot to the head.

The other big thing missing from the movie were so, so many moments of casual significance.  The book is really short, and there are several lines that a character tosses out there, nobody reacts, and the story forges ahead.  But if you stop and think about the line, some aspect of the story gets turned on its head and you have to reconsider it completely.  Things I wish had been included:

— When Gatsby tells Nick he’s from the Midwest — specifically, San Francisco.
— The line about Daisy’s voice being full of money.
— The whole thing about the books in Gatsby’s library — they’re real, but they’ve never been read. (This also would have been a fun thing to show new audiences — that once upon a time, books came in such a way that you had to cut the pages apart to read them. Sort of like having a library full of DVDs that still have that annoying plastic tape across the top – although even that is becoming a dated reference.)
— Gatsby never meets Daisy’s daughter. That, to me, was the most casually significant moment in the book. It’s a lot harder to undo a past that has created another whole human being whose presence must be reckoned with.  And I think DiCaprio could have done a really good job with it.

Overall, I went in expecting a 2 out of 10 and came out thinking I’d seen something that rated about a 4.  As such, I was mildly pleased, but I do hope someone comes along and does it better someday.  I mean, while we were at the theater, we saw a trailer for Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”  Can you imagine what he’d do with Gatsby? That’s the movie I want to see.

What would I have done differently? Quick list:

As I said, more visual cues.  More signs that the end is nigh.  Shooting the valley of ashes in black and white, not that weird CGI stuff.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Nick.  (If they’d had a decent actor, they also could have explored more about Nick’s goings-on with Jordan. That whole careless driver motif vanished in the movie.)

Or, going further afield, I’d shoot for a modern-day retelling.  I didn’t mind so much that they updated the soundtrack.  There are some references in the book that fly right by if you don’t get them, but they also aren’t crucial to an appreciation of the story at a different level. But if you’re going to update, why not go hard? Part of what made Gatsby great is that it was a snapshot of a time and place.  But history has plastered so many notions on to that time and place that now if you go there, you are stuck in a caricature.  Update the story to something people can relate to.  Gatsby as a crack dealer. Gatsby as a junk bond trader. That’s part of why I liked Wall Street—there are a lot of Gatsby notes struck in that movie, which was also a thoroughly modern snapshot of its moment in time.

So that’s it. I’m off the Gatsby kick.  My next batch of posts will be un-Gatsby.  They will, in fact, be about actual, modern-day writers who are among my very favorite people.

A friend and I were discussing weekend plans, and I mentioned that I might go see the new Gatsby movie.

 “But why?” she asked. “You already know it sucks, and it will drive you crazy.”

 She’s right, to an extent. And yet, I know I will go see it. Why? I guess because like the title character, I’m an optimist.  I want to like it. I want it to get some pieces right where previous attempts failed.  I will try to look for the good.

(I suspect I will also fail, given my distaste for Tobey One-Act Maguire and other assorted biases. If the spirit moves me, I’ll post a follow-up with my review, along with my vision of what a Gatsby movie would/could/should look like. Don’t hold your breath, though. I’m overbooked as it is.)

 I first read The Great Gatsby when I was in ninth grade, and I became an immediate fangirl.  By the time it was assigned reading in 11^th grade, I was prepped to write a college dissertation. I knew Fitzgerald’s other works, his wife’s works, their respective biographies, and the stories of characters who ran in their circle, like the Murphys and Hemingway.

 In college, I moved on to Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

 In my early 20s, I emulated the lifestyle. Fitzgerald had convinced me that I might as well put down the pen and not bother trying to create prose, so I did the next best thing and went into journalism, where I spent my time editing other people’s prose. I drank — a lot. I ran around. I had a good time.

(I also acquired a high-bouncing golden retriever that I named Gatsby. He was an unswervingly loyal and adoring dog, and I have always been very proud of how astute that moniker was for him.)

 In my late 20s, I realized that drunks were lousy role models, and got on with my life. I confess, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I knew about the Jazz Age and its chroniclers.

 But I haven’t forgotten that much. So I have been awaiting the release of the new Gatsby film with a certain amount of trepidation.  Partly because I have known all along that the movie will get it wrong, but also partly because of the inevitable flood of Fitzgerald analysis that such a spectacle was bound to generate, both in movie reviews posing as literary criticism and in straight-up academic analysis that’s being trotted out again because it has a shot at relevance. 

 So here’s my drop in that flood, I reckon. I’m sure these reveiwers and critics are all very clever people and very proud of their viewpoints. But the truth is, a great many of these brilliant conclusions are chestnuts.  Nick is gay! Fitzgerald hated gays and women, and was a total racist! The book was a flop when it came out! Gatsby was black!  News flash: None of this is news. It is well-traveled ground.

 My thinking is, the analysts make the same mistake as the movie makers. They miss the point entirely.

 I fell in love with the Great Gatsby because it spoke to me, as a reader. The writing was elegant and poetic. The story — well, what’s not to like? Decadence, opulence, mayhem, murder and true love. Of course moviemakers are drawn to it.

 But there’s more to it. Even in my first, green, uneducated pass through that world, I realized the message went beyond gorgeous depictions and dramatic turns. This was a beautiful book about some of the ugliest people I’d ever been exposed to. It was, to quote Fitzgerald, the first time I’d been challenged “to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” On the surface it juxtaposes the black-and-white valley of ashes with Gatsby’s vibrant Technicolor parties. It pits tradition against passion. And then you go deeper and realize it is a love note to something Fitzgerald clearly despised. It offers lush depictions, but comes in at an incredibly spare 50,000 words. Every word counts, and as every writer knows, that’s harder to accomplish than any non-writer might think.

 And, as I learned later, it is a creature of its time, much like all Fitzgerald’s works. Gatsby is, in fact, a story of betrayal on multiple levels. I’m not talking about just the plot, I’m talking about its conception. Fitzgerald was sick of being the dean of the Jazz Age, he was dismayed by some of the ramifications he was beginning to see. The hangover was starting to kick in, and he was starting to get tired. The beautiful life – which he always knew wasn’t all that beautiful  — had betrayed him. In writing the book, he betrayed those who expected him to keep on the same path of his previous works and his public persona.  I’m dating myself here, but remember when Billy Joel switched to classical? Have you listened to any of it? Probably not, because that’s not what you want him to be. Well, people didn’t like this change from Fitzgerald, either.

Fitzgerald did not come to praise Trimalchio, but to bury him, and all Romanesque hedonism. But somehow that salient point often seems to get lost in all the beaded splendor and picayune details.

 Is Nick gay? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he has a drunken dalliance that Fitzgerald includes to further underscore his view of the moral decay and decline taking place around him. (Was Fitzgerald a homophobe? Uh, probably? It wasn’t an unusual position to take back then and letters bear out he was a bit rough, although he seems to have developed a bit of tolerance as he got older and a bit more sympathetic. Does that translate to homosexual panic? I doubt it. Either way, I’m not sure this is a case where the author’s predilections necessarily had a huge impact on his work.) Nick refers to himself as “one of the few honest people [he’s] ever known,” yet he opts to leave out the details of his encounter with Mr. McKee at the end of Chapter Two. I don’t know enough about the early drafts of Gatsby to know if there was ever a scene included that was cut, but I don’t think there was. And it’s also conceivable that Fitzgerald didn’t actually have any personal experience to draw upon here, so he simply opted not to sketch the event at all. But I think the point here is that your honest narrator couldn’t bring himself to be honest about what occurred there, so he resorts to a sin of omission – but not complete omission — and in so doing, lumps himself in with the rest of his corrupt environs.

 This should be an indication that the feminists who come down on Fitzgerald as a terrified hater of women have also got it a bit wrong. Fitzgerald doesn’t single women out – he’s an equal-opportunity hater, if that’s the word you prefer. Men, women, dogs, most of the things he’s writing about are objects of disgust. Race and class are disregarded, all get the same scrutiny and all come up wanting. Nick says he’s reserving judgment, but the entire book is one condemnation after another. When Jordan turns the tables on him, he hasn’t much to say.

 Is Gatsby black? I suppose it’s possible. There’s no concrete description of him. Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, pointed this out in his first reading of the book, saying something to the effect that Gatsby was hard to get ahold of in one’s mind, and that while he assumed this was intentional, it was a distraction nonetheless. Fitzgerald fixed that with some talk about Gatsby’s smile and his tanned features. But the whole point is that Gatsby is a chameleon. He is who you want him to be. So if you want him to be black and passing, OK, he is. If you want to believe he’s a Minnesota farm kid like the vast majority of Minnesota farm kids from the early 1900s, he is.  Again, it’s not the main point.

 The point of this book is not in the personal details that academic analysis is so fond of picking apart.  And it’s not in the racy and dazzling story that draws in the moviemakers. The point of the book is in the implications, the unspoken judgments of others, the overall sensation of a worn-out, world-weary, cynic trying to find a scintilla of beauty and, on believing he has found it, sees it snuffed out.

 In my 40s, I understand that weariness a lot better than I did in my 20s. I understand how you can hate someone who has irreparably damaged you yet still love them enough to wish things had been different and remember all the things that attracted you in the first place. I understand the characters more than I did – yes, Daisy is unsullied white on the outside and corrupted by gold on the inside, but she is also struggling – between her husband and her first true love, between her traditional upper-class roots and the current come-as-you-are culture of emancipation, between what is and what could be. She absolutely possesses all the negative characteristics you want to heap on her – careless, selfish, bratty, shallow, I give you everything. But as an old person, I find myself coming at her these days more in sorrow than in anger.

 The sign of a truly great work of literature – and of art, I suppose — is that you find something new in every reading – not because the book has changed, but because you have. That, I think, is why it’s such a hard thing to translate great literature to the screen. A movie adaptation is a snapshot of one person’s interpretation at one moment in time. A good movie adaptation should be as capable as the book of pulling a viewer in and letting them discover new things with each viewing, but it’s a lot harder to pull off. And yet, I keep hoping it will happen, so I will keep watching them.

(And probably hating them, but in my better moments, loving them for what they could have been.)