The Great Gatsby on Film

Year 2013, Issue: 37, 99 - 105, 01.04.2013

James M. Welsh

Abstract

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby co-written with Craig Pearce had the honor of being the May 15th opener of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, though it was originally scheduled to open six months earlier in December of 2012, and it had already opened on American screens. Luhrmann is considered an astonishingly visual filmmaker, and the visual spectacle is astonishing as well as entertaining; but at the same time, this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, though not as literal as the Jack Clayton 1974 adaptation, which it now replaces new stars for old, though Robert Redford and Mia Farrow still seem luminous to me , is in a way even more literal, though not at all faithful to its source novel. Luhrmann tampers with Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway played by Tobey Maguire by making him the focal point of the story, which he relates to a therapist years later, and finally ends up typing a manuscript called “Gatsby,” which, perhaps, is meant to tell us that this certainly isn’t Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

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