The Great Gatsby (2013)

Finally, I went to see one of my – and just about everyone else’s – most anticipated films of the year.       

My fears about its humour being lost went unrealised. Though the antics of the party guests were jettisoned, as most would have to have been in the interests of time economy, the owl-eyed library man remained.

So, too, did one of my favourite passages, when Gatsby almost loses his nerve and flees into the rain before meeting Daisy again, only to turn back at the last moment:

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living-room was deserted.

“Well, that’s funny,” I exclaimed.

“What’s funny?”

She turned her head as there was a light dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

This is a Baz Luhrmann film, so can almost go without saying that it is visually splendid. The parties, costumes, hair, makeup, jewellery, sets – all are exquisite.

It is remarkably true to the novel, with the exception of the device used for Nick Carraway to narrate. Though a small and understandable liberty to take for the sake of clarity and narrative drive, I smarted a little at this flouting, but it stands alone in terms of artistic licence. Even passages I thought there was no way even Luhrmann could possibly film and preserve the sense of the original were masterfully done.

Perhaps the most memorable moment for me was another of my favourite descriptive passages:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Unfilmable, you say? No, sir.

All of the characters are finely portrayed: Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s “vast carelessness” and Jordan Baker’s cool indifference are just as written, and Nick as utterly nice.

The flesh and blood characters, who stand in stark contrast to Daisy, Tom and Jordan, are the bleary George Wilson and his painted wife (nice to see Isla Fisher, though I wished a little that Luhrmann chose someone less conventionally pretty for coarse, meaty Myrtle and changed up the beautiful lady brigade some).

And of course, Jay Gatsby himself was played stunningly by Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems incapable of doing a crap job at anything. His rage when he finally blows at Tom is an awesome thing to see. He seems to really get Gatsby’s dreadful commitment to hope, and his undeniable likeability. His rendering of Nick’s first impression of him is perfect, as true to the book’s spirit as it was when he stood tragically in the puddle.

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you just as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

A challenge, surely, for any actor – and yet, he delivers.

I was heart-glad there was so much of the elegance and loveliness of Fitzgerald’s writing in this script, especially the pristine transfer of the words to the closing scene. Though an example of what to me was a slight overuse of stylised on-screen typeface, a little too much like Moulin Rouge, it certainly showed that those making this movie understood the importance of the moment.

I gripped StuMo’s hand perhaps too hard, but I had goosebumps, a physical response to this return to the trope of the green light, and the use of words that could not be improved upon, from when Nick walks through “ that huge incoherent failure of a house” one more time, to the last moment on the dock.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter: tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I always love a novel-to-screen adaptation, even enjoying those that are mediocre, or disappoint on details. There is nothing to replace the feeling of sharing a previously private experience, of meeting people you feel close to for the first time, even if they differ slightly to what you saw in your mind’s eye.

This was not mediocre or disappointing. It was magical, like food, deeply nourishing to the soul, to see The Great Gatsby brought to life.