Exciting, right?

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. I remembered it as a bit slow, full of wide-lapeled pastel suits, and over-scored in the way that big-budget movies from “Old Hollywood” sometimes are. All of that is true, but it is also a pretty good scene-by-scene adaptation of the novel, and it is almost entirely watchable. The only time I literally cringed was during a scene in which Gatsby dons his Great War uniform and dances with Daisy by the light of a single candle. They twirl around and around and around with their mouths stuck together as if they are transferring an alien baby egg from one of their bodies to the other. I hope they got that in one take.

The actors probably fit their roles better than in any of the other adaptations. Fitzgerald famously avoided direct physical description of Jay Gatsby, so why not Robert Redford? Mia Farrow’s Daisy could perhaps be more overtly a Southerner, and I could stand more conniving malevolence from Lois Chiles’s Jordan Baker. Sam Waterston as Nick, Bruce Dern as Tom, and Karen Black as Myrtle, and Scott Wilson as George Wilson all match their roles as well as I think readers can expect. Howard Da Silva, robbed of the novel’s second appearance of Meyer Wolfsheim, is memorable despite the scant screen time.

As far as the look of the movie, I’m not sure what it is about period films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, but no matter what they do with costuming, cars, and hair styles, it still looks like the late 1960s or early 1970s. Maybe it’s the cameras, the lighting, the color palettes. I don’t know. But Hello Dolly! looks like 1968, Summer of ‘42 looks like 1971, and The Great Gatsby looks like 1974. I’m sure everyone did their research, but something about the illusion is incomplete. This Gatsby is shot entirely in a soft focus, which is intended perhaps to suggest the haze of memory, and it does make the sterling tea service sparkle. If the idea was to make the world appear not quite solid, I guess it was successful. As for me, I had to fight the impulse to clean my glasses every few minutes.

Where I want to turn my attention, though, in this series on the Gatsby films, is to the adaptation itself. What the adaptation retains of the original, what it emphasizes, and what it excises, go to the success or failure of the adaptation. We’ll be here all day if I go scene by scene noting differences, so I’ll highlight a couple of minor but notable and interesting changes, and then look at one major and, to my mind, problematic change.

In chapter two of the novel, Nick accompanies Tom and his mistress Myrtle to the Washington Heights apartment Tom keeps for their rendezvous(es?). Myrtle invites her sister and the neighbors, among others, and a small party coalesces. Late in the evening, as Nick tells it,

Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—”

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain.

The film presents this moment pretty faithfully up until Tom takes his swing, but then, bleeding from the nose, Myrtle begins to cry and says Daisy’s name a few more times quietly, as if maintaining her defiance, and Tom takes her in his arms in what looks like apology and consolation. In the novel, we don’t know what Tom does after the blow. I have always thought that by characterizing it as a “deft movement” with an “open hand,” Fitzgerald depicts Tom’s violence as calculated and controlled cruelty. His anger has not overtaken him; he’s just enforcing his rules.

So to what effect do the filmmakers end the moment with a deescalation and an embrace? Is it a misguided attempt to soften the Tom character? I say “misguided” because Fitzgerald is so consistent in his depiction of Tom as irredeemable. Is it an attempt to make the presentation of relationship violence more realistic by showing the pattern of lashing out followed by a show of contrition? I’m not sure where the national conversation was on the topic at the time, but that would surprise me. It seems that someone was uncomfortable enough with the scene as Fitzgerald wrote it that a decision was made to mitigate the violence. I have no answer, but I find the choice highly interesting.

In the film’s first party scene with Nick in attendance, an intimidating butler comes to Nick, who is with Jordan Baker, and leads him away from the party. Nick, believing he is in some kind of gate-crashing trouble, insists to the butler that he was invited. When he is deposited in Gatsby’s study, Gatsby introduces himself and, in a series of awkward silences, the two men agree to get together and become acquainted.

This differs significantly from the novel in which Gatsby and Nick chat for a few moments in the midst of the party, and when Nick says, “this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation,” Gatsby realizes Nick doesn’t know who he’s speaking with and introduces himself. Some time later, it is Jordan Baker who is summoned to the study by a butler.

The film scene, with a tuxedoed Redford behind a large desk welcoming an intimidated and reflexively contrite guest, feels like a minor reprise of the famous scene in The Godfather, not so coincidentally another Coppola project. There’s nothing particularly inconsistent with the novel about the scene. It’s one way to introduce the two characters to each other. Gatsby clearly likes to stage events, and the awkwardness of their exchange suggests Carraway’s remark in the novel that, after knowing Gatsby a month, “I found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say.”

The opportunity passed up, though, is the suggestion in Fitzgerald’s scene that, unrecognized and divided from his name, Gatsby is ordinary. Nick takes him to be no one special, just one among the many nameless partygoers. It’s also unclear at that point in the novel whether Gatsby knows who Nick is. He may recognize him as his next-door neighbor, but does he know that he is related to Daisy? It’s uncertain. The film version with the summons, the staged and set meeting with Nick off-balance, suggests a level of control, a deliberation in Gatsby that the novel does not.

These kinds of changes or discrepancies on their own may not matter much, but they can accumulate to shift the tone of the work and its thematic focus. As I have remarked to students so often in the past, what makes The Great Gatsby a special novel is its narration, and when we turn on the camera, the narration is the first thing to go. When someone says of a film or TV adaptation of a novel, as they so often do, “the book was better,” I think what they are really saying is, “bringing the story to life” did not compensate for the loss of the narrator.

When we read a novel like The Great Gatsby, “listening in” while someone like Nick Carraway recalls “riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” is the reason we’re there. But if we’re going to the movies, we need to see and hear the excursions and the glimpses for ourselves. The idea of recollection, of “past tense,” must be set aside or, as in every extant film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, preserved only as a framing device. A film, like a play, as Thornton Wilder wrote in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” “takes place in a perpetual present time.” While we may understand that the film or play depicts events that took place in the past of the fictional world, but as Wilder says, “on the stage it is always now.” The same holds true, I would argue, for the screen.

I highlight this perhaps obvious distinction between fiction and film because it gets to the heart of both the impulse and the problem of adaptation. Bringing to vivid life on the stage or screen a story that moves us always sounds like a great idea. We imagine, then we invent, making real in the world what we have only thought of. Reading is an act of imagination, and we inevitably seek to make what we imagine “real.”

The novel The Great Gatsby is the first-person recollection of the summer of 1922 by Nick Carraway. It’s a simulated memoir. He writes between one and two years after the events he dramatizes. One of the first things an adaptation has to decide is whether to preserve that limited point-of-view by putting Nick in every scene and depicting only what he observes. It’s a hard boundary, and one that this film, forgivably, chooses not to observe. (Even Fitzgerald struggled with it; there is a long scene in chapter eight that Nick narrates even though he wasn’t present. Passing references to an “inquest” are the thin explanation as to his detailed knowledge of events he didn’t witness and conversations he didn’t hear.)

The most significant additions the film makes to the novel are several ponderous scenes between Gatsby and Daisy that “flesh out” the progress of their relationship after their reunion at Nick’s cottage. Of course these scenes are sans Nick, but to provide them with dialogue, Coppola repurposes Nick’s narration from the novel. When the script runs out of things for them to say, they kiss. A lot. (I am not against kissing, but if anyone wants to edit the film down from 143 minutes to a tight two hours, I know what to cut.)

There is logic to this choice, and coming off the success of films like Love Story and The Way We Were (also starring Redford), the emphasis on the romance of Daisy and Gatsby for this film is understandable. Still, it undermines the adaptation in two important ways.

First, it renders as “facts” and “reasons” ideas that Fitzgerald offers up as Nick’s interpretations and conclusions. It gives a definite outline to an aspect of the novel that Fitzgerald chose to leave to the reader’s imagination. When Nick leaves Daisy and Gatsby alone in Gatsby’s house at the end of chapter five, we don’t know what happens afterward. A few weeks later Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby’s parties, and a few weeks after that, Gatsby tells Nick that “Daisy comes over quite often — in the afternoons.” The film indulges an impulse to fill in a blank that didn’t need filling, and one that seems directly to contradict the source. Maybe the public was demanding love scenes. Perhaps the stars were promised more screen time.

Second, much of the narration repurposed into dialogue comes from Nick Carraway’s long-considered and reconsidered understanding of what he saw and heard. His words are the result of his piecing together and sense-making of experiences that initially confounded him. Giving those thoughts and words to Daisy and Gatsby in the moment of their summer affair makes them much more thoughtful, self-aware, moral, and, dare I say, intelligent characters than the ones Fitzgerald shows us in the pages of his novel. The Daisy in these scenes is not “careless” enough and the Gatsby not self-deluded enough for the rest of the story to make sense. They see themselves and each other too clearly not to avoid the consequences the plot drives them toward.

At the end of the novel, Nick is alone with his reflections. In the film, all of the surviving principal characters are onscreen for a send off. But Nick is still the one feeling the lack of resolution, disgusted at the callousness with which Daisy and Tom have put their infidelities and their dead lovers behind them. We get an ending of the events, but the adaptation has to deny us the ending of the story because the story is the memory and the assembly of its meaning. That’s the part no one can film. I suppose a scene of Nick somewhere in St. Paul typing up the end of his manuscript with a voice over of his final thoughts might come close. Still, who wants to watch that when there is one more beaded gown, fur coat, and cloche hat for Ms. Farrow to wear.

Are there other changes to the novel in this film that you love, hate, or love to hate? Let me know in the comments.

Next time, the much-overlooked 2000 television version starring Mira Sorvino as Daisy, Toby Stephens as Gatsby, and Paul Rudd as Nick.

The first charge, usually levelled by one of the more goal-oriented kids who has done some surface-level research, is that Nick Carraway is “unreliable.” The online study guides no doubt refer to Carraway as an “unreliable narrator” without fully introducing and explaining what that means as a matter of literary study. Without context, it sounds like a problem. Why am I reading someone unreliable? Shouldn’t the narrator be reliable?

It takes about one class period to convince them that this is actually the fun part. Far from a problem, it’s the point. It’s authorial slight-of-hand. A subspecies of dramatic irony in which we understand what is true in the world of the story even though the only person speaking didn’t tell us. Even though, in some instances, they said something quite different. “Put not your faith in narrators,” I say. Once students see that this business of unreliability is not a flaw in the character’s character, we can usually move on to the green light and the car accidents.

Sometimes, though, the sophomore prosecution does not rest, and we respond to the second, and not lesser, charge of Nick’s hypocrisy. It usually starts like this:

Student 1: “He says he reserves judgment, but then he judges everybody in the book.”
Student 2: “Yeah, he’s judging them the whole time.”
Student 3: “He’s a liar.”
Student 1: He’s worse. He’s a hypocrite.
Student 4: Can I go fill my water bottle?

Set your watch. In twenty minutes, Student 4 will ask to use the bathroom.

At this point, you’re going to want to grab your copy of The Great Gatsby and turn to the first page. I’ll wait.

You don’t have your Gatsby? <sighs> Okay. I have an extra copy.

If you’re with me on page one of the Scribner edition, you see right there in the third paragraph where Nick says, “In consequence [of my father’s advice], I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.” He then goes on to explain how much and how often he learned more about people than he ever wanted to know. The first thing to notice here is the word “inclined.” It’s not a practice and it’s not a rule; it’s not a rigid personal code. It’s an inclination to offer people the benefit of the doubt, and doubts can be removed. The second thing I find important is that he complains about the consequences of reserving judgments (or seeming to). It sounds like it’s been more trouble than it’s worth. As any well-trained counselor can attest, it is when people don’t feel judged that their full weirdness will emerge. Nick, it seems, has absorbed more than his share of weirdness.

If you turn to page two or the beginning of the next paragraph, you’ll see the sentence, “And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.” The rest of the paragraph explains, in somewhat cryptic terms, that the tale he is about to tell, the experiences he will relate, made him want to shut out people, their faults, foibles, and moral failings. He says, “I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart,” and that “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—”

So, we know that he knows he’s writing a book, and the book will be the explanation of why he could no longer reserve or withhold judgment on the people and events he will tell us about. The only glimmer of faith he found was in Gatsby, despite his crimes, despite his ardent pursuit of a married woman. To the rest, he extended the benefits of doubts, but then the doubts were removed. In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway reached the limits of his tolerance.

What is extraordinary about that is somehow he finds the duplicities and infidelities of the characters in the novel more disgusting and despair-inducing that World War I, from which he seems to have emerged emotionally unscathed. How he came through the war with his “provincial squeamishness” (179) intact is a question only Fitzgerald could answer. (I have a theory that he spent the war as an aide or chauffeur to a general.) In the formal, literary sense he is an unreliable narrator, but as a character, I see no reason to doubt that he tells us the truth as he sees it, or remembers it. That makes him about as reliable as anyone.

As to the charge of hypocrisy: he tells us up-front that reserving judgments is an ideal from which he falls well short, and with good reason. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope” (2), he says. Tom and Daisy and Jordan and Myrtle and Wilson exhausted his stores of hope. The good news for Nick, and for us, is that we can replenish them. This we know because Nick tells us that the “foul dust that floated in the wake of [Gatsby’s] dreams … temporarily [my italics] closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” (2).