The Great Gatsby (1974) - film review

In 1922, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who earns a modest income selling bonds, moves into a bungalow between two mansions on Long Island in New York.  One of the mansions belongs to Nick’s distant cousin Daisy Buchanan and her millionaire husband Tom; the other is owned by a reclusive businessman named Jay Gatsby, who hosts lavish evening parties throughout the summer.  Rumours about Gatsby’s past and how he acquired his fortune abound, but the man remains a mystery.  One day, Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s parties and is taken to see his host.  Nick agrees to arrange for Gatsby to meet Daisy at his bungalow and discovers that, during the war, the two were once passionately in love.  Whilst Daisy has moved on and now lives a comfortable, albeit empty, existence with Tom, Gatsby still clings to the past and is determined to revive their former passion.  But time is fast running out...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the most important works in American literature.  A powerfully moving study in the folly of pursuing an unattainable love to the exclusion of all else, it offers both a startlingly vivid evocation of the period between the wars and an intensely ironic critique of the American dream.  In a few pages,  Fitzgerald crafts a haunting parable for out times, contrasting the moral and spiritual vacuity of those who live within the bubble of excessive wealth with the flawed heroism of one man who, Canute-like, attempts to hold back time and resurrect a lost love, only to end up building a vast empty mausoleum to a forgotten romance.  How could such a beautiful and incisive piece of literature fail to make the transition from the printed page to the silver screen?

Director Jack Clayton may have read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel but he doesn’t appear to have understood it, if his film is anything to go by.  This third adaptation of The Great Gatsby is superficially attractive, offering all the usual Hollywood glamour - a stylish cast, pretty sets and lush soft-focus photography - but it singularly fails to deliver the emotional power and beguiling insights into the human condition offered by the original novel.  Robert Redford’s Gatsby has none of the complexity, mystique and pathos of Fitzgerald’s creation and merely comes across as a deluded, manipulative socialite, grinning inanely and looking like someone posing for the front cover of Vogue.  Mia Farrow’s Daisy is even further from the mark, an empty-headed narcissistic blonde who gives a good impression of Deborah Kerr on her way back from an LSD trip - how can we be expected to believe that this pathetic creature could possibly inspire a man to go to such extraordinary lengths to recapture her after their brief encounter during the war?  Only Bruce Dern’s Tom Buchanan is faithful to the novel, but this is small comfort when the parts of Gatsby and Daisy are such flagrant misfires.

This is a classic example of a film adaptation that tries too hard to reproduce the literal content of its source novel whilst completely overlooking its meaning.  Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplay follows Fitzgerald’s novel almost to the letter, and Jack Clayton is just as slavish in his direction, blindly sticking to the book like a talentless cook following a complicated recipe.  The film may well be effective in capturing the period in which the story is set - the exuberance of the Jazz Age coupled with the staggering inequalities that existed between the various strata of American society - but it completely neglects what Fitzgerald is really saying in his novel and it just feels like a hollow exercise in populist filmmaking.   However, if this lavish monument to crass insipidity encourages people to pick up Fitzgerald’s novel and discover a great work of literary art, then that can be no bad thing.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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