Giving The Great Gatsby (film) a Second Chance

I don’t review films. I enjoy them, but film criticism and lore simply aren’t in my first language. However, The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels, and now that I’ve seen the new film based on it, I feel a strong desire to talk about what I think I’ve seen.

Some poets and writers I deeply respect and have learned from are left cold by this book. They think it is overrated. I know this. I still reread it every other year with deepening admiration.

I'm the sort of reader who should hate any movie based on this book. Nothing can live up the to story in my head.

And when I saw the first promotions, I had my doubts. The music in the promos made the film look more like our century than Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties. Add to this Toby McGuire playing Nick Caraway, and my expectations seemed to drop even lower. 

Reserving Judgment

Even so, I chose to reserve judgment. I'm glad I did because some of my misgivings seemed destined for fulfillment as the movie started. 

First, we should be honest about this. Toby McGuire starts out and remains far too adoring of his subject. In my readings of the novel, Nick Caraway is reserved, critical, even puritanical in his measuring of Jay Gatsby. He seems afraid to get his feet wet.

Not so in this film. McGuire's Nick seems willing to believe Gatsby’s dream, and this is a problem. The narrator is supposed to have this critical distance from his subject.

My second problem concerns the voice-over at the start of the film with what at first appear to be the first lines of the novel. Those first lines are burned in my consciousness. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” But after this famous opening, the movie plays fast and slick, reducing Nick’s father’s nuanced, smug advice—“remember, they haven’t had the advantages that you have had”—to “don’t look down on others.”

This is pure pop culture junk. Nuances of Nick’s character are immediately jettisoned in favor of audience identification, and the movie feels in danger to me.

But that is not how things unfold. After the initial tone setting, this movie comes alive—the pacing, except for the middle, is certainly well done. The party scenes somehow seem to straddle both Fitzgerald’s era and our own. The cultural references—the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Kaiser Willhelm, all the jazz—and then all of the costumes and the dancing, root us in an era, and then the modern music layers it gently, bringing our era in. Something intended emerges. There is the gentle suggestion that we recognize what we still do and think.

The Past, the Present

This all begins to work on an uncanny level. When Nick is taken to the party over Wilson’s garage and meets Myrtle, Tom Buchannan’s extra-marital love interest, the focus on the ashes and the workers in that section between East and West Egg and New York makes for an economic comparison in which the wealthy keep getting wealthier while the rest remain in their struggles. This seems an increasingly modern perspective. The excesses, the wealth, the poverty, and the boredom seem contemporary, not just some figment of a romantic past.

And the story—Gatsby’s story—is caught in this, even drives it through his disturbing vision of the past he would repeat. I come to understand that Nick considers Gatsby great, not because of the gaudy empire he has built, but because of his infinite capacity for hope.

So in the end, as the scene fades to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and then the dock vanishes and only the green light remains hanging there in the dark, that is what we are left with—the audience staring out at the green light. Gatsby is gone, or a ghost, but there we sit, in the dark, with that green pin point of light for several seconds.This is the light that would link us with Gatsby.

This is what I saw. It seems to me a powerful adaptation that makes something new of Fitzgerald’s novel without doing it violence.

It makes a fitting tribute. I highly recommend it.