download the new version for iphoneThe Great Gatsby

I'm not even sure it's his fault he doesn't. Having seen the movie, I think maybe I was wrong: Redford could have played Gatsby.

I saw him as Tom Buchanan, and somebody else as Gatsby ( Jack Nicholson, maybe, or Bruce Dern - who plays Tom). When the casting of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby was announced, I objected because he didn't fit my notion of Gatsby: He was too substantial, too assured, even too handsome. But the director, Jack Clayton, having assembled a promising cast, fails to exploit them very well. Tom's mistress Myrtle and her husband, the shabby filling station owner George, live in a wasteland of ashes in Fitzgerald's novel in the movie, they seem to have landed on the moon.Īll of this unfeeling physical excess might have been overcome by performances. Daisy and her husband, the ruthless millionaire Tom Buchanan, live almost drowning in whites, yellows, and ennui. The art director and set decorator seem to have ripped whole pages out of Fitzgerald and gone to work to improve on his descriptions. They're memorials to a novel in which they had meaning.

The beacon and the other Fitzgerald symbols are in this movie version, but they communicate about as much as the great stone heads on Easter Island. For Fitzgerald, there was always something unattainable and for Gatsby, it was Daisy Buchanan, the lost love of his youth, forever symbolized by that winking green beacon at the end of her dock. The mundane Midwestern origins had been replaced by a new persona, by a flash and charisma that sometimes only concealed the despair underneath. Paul to personify the romance of an age, was writing in a way about himself when he created Gatsby. Yet I've never thought the events in The Great Gatsby were that important to the novel's success Fitzgerald, who came out of St. The movie is 'faithful' to the novel with a vengeance - to what happens in the novel, that is, and not to the feel, mood, and spirit of it. It would take about the same time to read Fitzgerald's novel as to view this movie - and that's what I'd recommend. I wonder what Fitzgerald, whose prose was so graceful, so elegantly controlled, would have made of it: of the willingness to spend so much time and energy on exterior effect while never penetrating to the souls of the characters. The Great Gatsby is a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F.

Download the new version for iphoneThe Great Gatsby