Modernizing a Classic Tale: For Better or For Worse?

I wanted it to be beautiful. But it was utter disappointment. I wanted it to reflect a classic story of unending hope and love. But the tricks and trinkets of Hollywood suffocated a timeless novel called Gatsby. 

I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" in Ms. Gray's English class at John Burroughs High School. As a class we dissected Nick Carroway's first person tale of what it was like to live a life in West Egg, but not of West Egg. As a class we discussed the integral role of the flashing green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock. We discovered the meaning behind the ever-watching eyes of T. J. Eckleburg in the Valley of Ashes. We debated over the tainted innocence of Jay Gatsby. 

When I learned the book would once again grace the big screen, I reread the novel and was reminded of everything we had talked about in my English class. The symbolism, East Egg's ignorance, Nick's  internal monologues... they all flooded back to me in shades of vivid memories. I envisioned what Hollywood might do with the novel and how they might portray the characters. But nothing could have prepared me for what director Baz Luhrmann did to my beloved Gatsby. 

The movie was all wrong. From the very beginning, Luhrmann butchered a classic...again...as you remember with his atrocious  modern rendition of Romeo and Juliet- starring Leonardo DeCaprio, might I add. 

Luhrmann opens as Nick shares his life's memoir with a doctor in the Perkins Sanatorium. Although I understand why this detail may have been added, numerous flashbacks to the hospital room were annoying and unnecessary in the unfolding of the plot. 

The movie continued with a series of jumbled scenes, unbefitting musical selections and dizzying camera pans that made my head spin. 

"Luhrmann uses Nick's narration to anchor his characteristic flourishes - 3-D animation; frantic pacing...But the film depends too much on Carroway telling us what's going on, and it ultimately belabors Fitzgerald's celebrated story, rather than elevate it," U.S. News. 

Gatsby's parties held at his mansion in West Egg were nothing short of a circus, as Tom Buchanan refers to them many times. It was here that the class and distinguished character of Jay Gatsby vanished. In the novel, the parties seemed more regal and fancy than they did in the movie, perhaps in part because I was 16-years-old when I first read the book. But all the same, the parties displayed a disgusting side of a social class obsessed with the perks and pleasures of obscene amounts of money. It just didn't seem right. 

The cast could not have been more perfectly selected. All the way down to Meier Wolfsheim, every character was a perfect representation. Had the direction been more closely centered around the story line and less around the special effects of Nick's journal, the movie would have turned out. 

Typically I am not one to "rant." It is not my intention to share my feelings about a letdown of a movie. My intentions revolve around preserving an American classic. It is my estimate that over half of Gatsby's viewers have never even read the book. The prose and showing imagery Fitzgerald so wonderfully displayed in his novel were lost in this movie. 

I never anticipated a movie so much as I did this one. Perhaps the silver lining is Jack Clayton's rendition of The Great Gatsby, starring  Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Its available at the click of a mouse on Netflix. 

Clayton captured the essence of Gatsby, and the picture was beautiful. 

Modernization and a recognized classic do not mesh. They weren't meant to mesh.