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Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" isn't a disaster. Every frame is sincere. Its miscalculations come from a wish to avoid embalming a classic novel in "respectfulness" — a worthy goal, in theory. It boasts the third most imaginative use of 3D I've seen recently, after "U2 3D" and " Hugo ." It's a technological and aesthetic lab that has four or five experiments cooking in each scene. Even when the movie's not working, its style fascinates. 

That "not working" part is a deal breaker, though — and it has little to do with Luhrmann's stylistic gambits, and everything to do with his inability to reconcile them with an urge to play things straight.

If you've seen Lurhmann's " Strictly Ballroom ," " Romeo + Juliet " or " Moulin Rouge ," or watched "Gatsby" trailers, you know what you're in for: an epic melodrama that fuses old-movie theatrics and subjective filmmaking, period music and modern pop, real sets and unreal landscapes, psychological drama and speeded-up slapstick.

We see the book's Prohibition-era settings (East Egg and West Egg, New York City, and the sooty wasteland in between) through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway ( Tobey Maguire ), who's writing a memoir-confession from an asylum. This framing device is inferred from statements Fitzgerald made in "The Crack-Up," and "Gatsby" often refers to itself as a book, so even though it isn't officially part of the source, it's hardly a blasphemous indulgence; still, it's one more buffer between viewer and story in a movie that already has more than its share.

All this busywork might astonish if Lurhmann's heart were in it—but is it? The guests at Gatsby's party are too obviously directed, and there's no sense of escalation in the gatherings. From frame one, they're Dionysian whirls of booze, lust and hero worship, minus the sense that that things are ebbing and flowing as they would at a real party. The CGI-assisted camera acrobatics feel obligatory. So do the anachronistic soundtrack mash-ups (modern hip-hop layered over ragtime piano and the like).

But in the film's dark second half, "The Great Gatsby" half-forgets its mandate to wow us and zeroes in on actors in rooms. Once that happens, the Luhrmannerisms distract from the film's true heart: the actions and feelings of its characters. Luhrmann didn't set out to make a PBS-style, bare-bones adaptation, but there are times when it feels as though he secretly wants to. 

Once you get past the movie's opening eruptions of visual excess — hundreds of party guests boozing and hollering and doing the Charleston; CGI cityscapes that visualize 1920s New York by way of Warren Beatty's candy-colored " Dick Tracy "; a long expository talk between Gatsby and Nick in a careening computer-buffed roadster that moves as believably as the talking cab in " Who Framed Roger Rabbit " — "The Great Gatsby" settles into a traditional groove: scene, scene, montage, scene, burst of violence, moment of reflection. The movie wants to be a "kaleidoscopic carnival," to quote a phrase from the book's description of a Jay Gatsby party, but Luhrmann's instincts seem more traditional, even square, and the two impulses cancel each out. Once you've spent time with his cast, you understand why he was torn.

DiCaprio's Gatsby is the movie's greatest and simplest special effect: an illusion conjured mainly through body language and voice. On the page, the character is so mysterious, so much a projection of the book's narrator, that you'd think he'd be as unplayable onscreen as Kurtz or John Galt; he eluded Alan Ladd and Robert Redford , the role's previous inhabitants. And yet DiCaprio makes him comprehensible and achingly real. The actor's choices drive home the idea that Gatsby is playing the man he wishes he were, and that others need him to be. We see the calculations behind his eyes, but we also believe that he could hide them from the other characters — most of them, anyway.

DiCaprio's acting evokes Nick's description of the human personality as "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Luhrmann cuts some scenes to make it seem as if the character really is omniscient — as if he can see and hear for miles and read people's thoughts and feelings — and DiCaprio plays these moments with a mix of inscrutability and delight, as if Gatsby knows something we don't, but is too clever to say precisely what. (He could play Superman.) When Gatsby's deceptions are revealed and his illusions shattered, DiCaprio becomes at once terrifying and pathetic, a false idol toppling himself from his pedestal. In his final moment of realization, DiCaprio's blue eyes match the blue of Gatsby's pool, and his anguished face, framed in tight close-up, has a ghastly beauty. This is an iconic performance — maybe his career best.

The rest of the cast is nearly as impressive. Nick Carraway is almost as much of an abstraction as Gatsby — an audience surrogate, with touches of The Nice Guy Betrayed — but Maguire humanizes him, just as DiCaprio does Gatsby. It helps that he's played so many wry blank-slate types, but there's something else going on in his performance besides familiar notes — something deeper and sadder. 

Carey Mulligan is physically and vocally right for Daisy Buchanan — when she flirts, the famous description of the character having "a voice like money" nearly makes sense — but the film doesn't idealize her, as Gatsby and Nick often seem to. There's a contradictory, complicated person there. She's matched — appropriately overmatched, really — by Joel Edgerton's Tom. The actor suits the book's description of the character as "hulking" and projects the jovial arrogance of a thug impersonating a cultured man with money; he's scary but life-sized, and always comprehensible. The small roles are well cast, too, with Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker as a standout. The director is genuinely interested in his actors' performances, and in the characters' psyches. When the tale's simmering resentments detonate (notably in a scene near the end that takes pretty big liberties with the book) the result is a more powerful experience than crowd scenes and CGI panoramas can deliver. 

There were times when I wished Luhrmann had made a smaller, squarer adaptation, because he seems to have the talent for it; I never would have imagined saying such a thing after seeing his other films, which have their merits but are hardly standard-bearers for subtlety. Alas, this "Gatsby" is so immense and overwrought — lumbering across the screen like the biggest, trashiest, loudest parade float of all time — that its intimacies feel like shared secrets between the director and the viewer. The movie's like a guest at a wild gathering who finds the frenzy tiresome and would rather be at home reading, but can't let on because he's supposed to be the life of the party.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Great Gatsby (2013)

Rated PG-13 for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language.

143 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby

Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan

Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson

Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway

Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan

  • Baz Luhrmann

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Film Review: ‘The Great Gatsby’

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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The Great Gatsby Review

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling in Baz Luhrmann ’s “ The Great Gatsby ,” which arrives six months after its originally scheduled December release date but maintains something of a gussied-up holiday feel, like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as staged by Liberace . Indeed, it comes as little surprise that the Aussie auteur behind the gaudy, more-is-more spectacles “ Moulin Rouge ” and “Australia” has delivered a “Gatsby” less in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald ’s novel than in that of its eponymous antihero — a man who believes bejeweled excess will help him win the heart of the one thing his money can’t buy. Cinema audiences can prove as fickle and elusive as Daisy Buchanan, too, but it’s a fair bet that a starry cast (and soundtrack) and sheer curiosity value will power this Warner/Roadshow co-production to career-best box office numbers for Luhrmann (a record currently held by “Australia,” at $211 million), if not quite enough to justify its supposed $127 million budget.

Like the blinking green beacon at the end of Daisy’s dock — so close and yet so far — Fitzgerald’s masterpiece of American letters has been a siren call for filmmakers ever since it was published in 1925. The first, silent screen adaptation arrived just one year later (and is now, like so many films of that era, believed lost), with subsequent versions following in 1949 (reconfigured into a film noir), 1974 (the best-known, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow) and for cable TV in 2000. Rarely included in official “Gatsby” inventories, 2002’s quite curious “G” found an analog for Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age in the world of contemporary music’s hip-hop elite, long before Luhrmann saw fit to enlist Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter as a collaborator on his film’s cheerfully anachronistic soundtrack. But no one has yet cracked “Gatsby” on film as ingeniously as the theater company Elevator Repair Service did in its 2010 stage adaptation, “ Gatz ,” built around one actor’s unabridged, cover-to-cover recitation of the novel.

It is often said that great books make for inferior films and vice versa, but there is something particular about “Gatsby” that seems to defy the screen. Transformed into voiceover, the running first-person narration of Nick Carraway (here played by Tobey Maguire ) turns stilted and dry (presumably a problem the silent version avoided). Scrutinized by the camera’s gaze, Fitzgerald’s beautifully deployed symbols and signifiers become leaden with portent: the green light, the yellow roadster, the mountain of custom-tailored shirts, the unused swimming pool and the ever-watchful eyes staring out from the billboard of an enterprising Queens oculist. With Luhrmann at the helm, those devices loom larger and more literal than ever, until they come to resemble the towering monoliths of “2001.”

Of course, to accuse Luhrmann (who also co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Craig Pearce ) of overkill is a bit like faulting a leopard for his spots. Love it or hate it, take it or leave it, this is unmistakably his “Gatsby” through and through, and as with all such carte-blanche extravaganzas (increasingly rare in this cautious Hollywood age), it exudes an undeniable fascination — at least for a while. In the notes for his unfinished final novel, “The Last Tycoon,” Fitzgerald famously wrote, “action is character,” but for Luhrmann action is production design, hairstyling, Prada gowns and sweeping, swirling, CGI-enhanced camera movements that offer more bird’s-eye views of Long Island (actually the Fox Studios in Sydney) than “The Hobbit” did of Middle-earth. Arguably, the movie reaches its orgiastic peak 30 minutes in, with the first full reveal of Gatsby himself (Leonardo DiCaprio ), accompanied by an explosion of fireworks and the eruption of Gershwin on the soundtrack. Where, really, can one go from there?

PHOTOS: ‘ The Great Gatsby’ Premiere: Film Opens in New York

But oh, how Luhrmann tries. Together with cinematographer Simon Duggan, he unleashes every manipulation he can think of — sepia flashbacks, smash zooms, split screens, superimpositions, period newsreel footage, new footage degraded to resemble period newsreel footage — all of it coming at you in three steroscopic dimensions. Only occasionally does the style seem like an actual response to the text rather than a visual circus operating independently of it. In one of the pic’s more striking passages, Carraway’s famous observation that he feels at once “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled” becomes a lyrical mosaic of shared New York experience. Less effectively, Luhrmann has complete sentences from the novel appear typed out on the screen — a gimmick explained by a framing device that situates Carraway in a sanitarium, recounting the tale of Gatsby to a captivated shrink (Jack Thompson) who encourages him to write the story down.

What Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that Fitzgerald was, via his surrogate Carraway, offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American empire, not an invitation to the ball. But Luhrmann identifies far more strongly with Gatsby than he does with Nick, and instead of a tragic figure undone by his false optimism and unrequited yearning, the character becomes an object of envy  —someone whose swank mansion and runway couture would be awfully nice to call one’s own. So the champagne flows like monsoon rain and the wild parties roar. Who cares if you’re doomed to meet an untimely end, so long as you go out looking fabulous?

Everyone does look the part in this “Gatsby,” not least DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan (as Daisy), though in the years since his innovative, modern-dress “Romeo + Juliet,” where style still sat in something like equal balance with substance, Luhrmann has become less interested in performances than in artful poses. Periodically, as if by accident, something like real emotion pokes up through the film’s well-manicured surface, as when Gatsby recounts his first meeting with Daisy, his face lighting up with the childlike hope that so entrances Nick about him. More often, “Gatsby” feels like a well-rehearsed classic in which the actors say their lines ably, but with no discernible feeling behind them. By far the liveliest work in the film comes from two actors with only a few minutes of screen time between them: the lithe, long-limbed newcomer Elizabeth Debicki as gabby golf pro Jordan Baker, and, in a single scene that marks his belated Hollywood debut, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan as the flamboyant Jewish “gambler,” Meyer Wolfsheim.

Among the uniformly accomplished technical contributions, Luhrmann’s producer wife, Catherine Martin (already a double Oscar winner for “Moulin Rouge”) once again stands out for her production and costume design.

Movie Stills:

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

Reviewed at Warner Bros. screening room, New York, April 30, 2013. (In Cannes Film Festival — opener, noncompeting.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 141 MIN.

  • Production: A Warner Bros. release presented in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and A&E Television of a Bazmark/Red Wagon Entertainment production. Produced by Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Douglas Wick, Lucy Fisher, Catherine Knapman. Executive producers, Barrie M. Osborne, Bruce Berman, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. Co-producer, Anton Monsted.
  • Crew: Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay, Luhrmann, Craig Pearce, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Camera (color, widescreen, Red Digital Cinema, 3D), Simon Duggan; editors, Matt Villa, Jason Ballantine, Jonathan Redmond; music, Craig Armstrong; executive music supervisor, Anton Monsted; production designer, Catherine Martin; supervising art director, Ian Gracie; art directors, Damien Drew, Michael Turner; set decorator, Beverly Dunn; costume designer, Martin; sound (Dolby Digital/Datasat/SDDS), Guntis Sics; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Wayne Pashley; re-recording mixers, Steve Maslow, Phil Heywood, Pashley; visual effects supervisor, Chris Godfrey; visual effects producer, Joyce Cox; visual effects, Animal Logic, Prime Focus, Rising Sun Pictures, Iloura, Industrial Light & Magic, Method Studios; stunt coordinator, Glenn Ruehland; assistant director, Jennifer Leacey; casting, Ronna Kress, Nikki Barrett.
  • With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Elizabeth Debicki, Jack Thompson, Amitabh Bachchan.

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Movie Review

Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle

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By A.O. Scott

  • May 9, 2013

The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s big and noisy new version of “The Great Gatsby” — and despite what you may have heard , it is an eminently enjoyable movie — is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you. I grant that this is not so easily done. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender, charming third novel has accumulated a heavier burden of cultural significance than it can easily bear. Short and accessible enough to be consumed in a sitting (as in “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s full-text staged reading), the book has become, in the 88 years since its publication, a schoolroom staple and a pop-cultural totem. It shapes our increasingly fuzzy image of the jazz age and fuels endless term papers on the American dream and related topics.

Through this fog of glib allusion and secondhand thinking, the wistful glimmer of Fitzgerald’s prose shines like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. If “The Great Gatsby” can’t quite sustain the Big Ideas that are routinely attached to it — a fact that periodically inspires showboating critical contrarians to proclaim that it’s not such a big deal after all — it nonetheless remains a lively, imaginative presence. The book may not be as Great as its reputation, but it is also, partly for that reason, better than you might expect. It is flawed and flimsy in some ways, but it still manages to be touching, surprising and, in its bittersweet fashion, a lot of fun.

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

All of which is to say that whatever you think of Mr. Luhrmann’s energetic, brightly colored rendering of the sad story of Jay Gatsby, the Trimalchio of West Egg, Long Island, it should at least be immune to accusations of sacrilege. “Gatsby” is not gospel; it is grist for endless reinterpretation. Mr. Luhrmann’s reverence for the source material is evident. He sticks close to the details of the story and lifts dialogue and description directly from the novel’s pages. But he has also felt free to make that material his own, bending it according to his artistic sensibility and what he takes to be the mood of the times. The result is less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence.

This is the first time Mr. Luhrmann has taken up an American source in an American setting (though his cast is mostly British and Australian), and his vision of 1920s Manhattan is exactly as naturalistic as his portrait of Belle Époque Paris in “Moulin Rouge” which is to say not very much. Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) is still a bully and a bigot, spouting the popular racist pseudoscience of his day. The gangster Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan) is a bit less of a cringe-worthy anti-Semitic caricature than he was in 1925. The poverty of George and Myrtle Wilson (Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher) remains a grim contrast to the endless ease of Gatsby and the Buchanans. But all of these people occupy a cartoon America that no living person has ever visited.

Some of the finely shaded social distinctions that preoccupied Fitzgerald — between Easterners and Westerners, new money and old — are noted, but they don’t have a whole lot of resonance. We are in a world of artifice and illusion, confected from old-fashioned production-design virtuosity and newfangled digital hocus-pocus.

In the 3-D version, the viewer swoops and swerves through one of Gatsby’s parties in a movement that combines Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with the controlled vertigo of a theme park ride. As it happens, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) compares the sybaritic scene at Gatsby’s mansion to “an amusement park.” And Mr. Luhrmann’s peculiar genius — also the thing that drives cultural purists of various stripes crazy — lies in his eager, calculating mix of refinement and vulgarity.

Neither Fitzgerald nor Nick, his diffident mouthpiece, was immune to the seductions of hedonism and luxury, and the book does not entirely succeed as a critique of American materialism at what seemed to be its high-water mark. Mr. Luhrmann, for his part, does not resist at all. He fuses the iconography of dressed-up ’20s decadence with the swagger of hip-hop high-end consumerism. Jay Gatsby has got money. He’s got cars. He’ll spend a hundred grand over by the bar.

But unlike, say, Jay-Z (an executive producer of the film), Jay Gatsby is a rich man whose modest background and criminal past are something to be hidden, sources of mystery, shame and potential ruin. To Tom Buchanan, Gatsby is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” while to Nick he is a shimmering enigma, first glimpsed through the window of his colossal home.

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To those of us watching in our modest multiplex seats, he is a movie star. In previous incarnations he was Robert Redford, Alan Ladd and Warner Baxter, and now Leonardo DiCaprio has slipped into the ice cream suit and the curious diction. “Old sport” may be the two hardest words for an American actor to say, but for Gatsby himself they were an affectation, so it is possible to overlook Mr. DiCaprio’s overdone accent. (I do wish he would try a performance without one, though.) More important, it is impossible to look away from him. His charisma has increased as his youthful prettiness has worn and thickened away, and he is beautiful, sad, confident and desperate in exactly the way Gatsby should be.

Everything in the movie — and nearly everything in the novel — passes through a double lens of romanticism. Gatsby is partly a creature of Nick’s imagination, and conjures up his own idealized vision of Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the girl he left behind and acquired his ill-gotten fortune to win back.

Is the tale of Daisy and Gatsby a credible love story? Fitzgerald himself was not sure, but Mr. Luhrmann, Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Mulligan make it an effective one. At a crucial, climactic moment — a scene in a suite at the Plaza Hotel — the director mutes his irrepressible, circus ringmaster showmanship and plunges into undiluted melodrama. The music stops, and the camera cuts among the assembled faces as the emotional core of the film is laid bare.

That scene stands out in a movie that is otherwise gaudily and grossly inauthentic. Jay Gatsby is too, of course. He is self-invented and also self-deluded, spinning out fantasies for himself and others as easily as he gives parties. As a character in Nick’s ruminations, in Fitzgerald’s sentences and in our national mythology, he is a complete mess. This movie is worthy of him.

“The Great Gatsby” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Cigarettes, adultery, illegal hooch and other jazz age vices.

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The great gatsby: film review.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan star in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The Great Gatsby: Film Review

While secondary characters wore the majority of Prada’s designs, Daisy’s party dress (pictured being worn by Carey Mulligan ) was the only one chosen for the primary characters.

The center holds amidst all the razzle-dazzle and razzmatazz of Baz Luhrmann ‘s endlessly extravagant screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘s imperishable The Great Gatsby .

As is inevitable with the Australian showman, who’s never met a scene he didn’t think could be improved by more music, costumes, extras and camera tricks, this enormous production begins by being over-the-top and moves on from there. But, given the immoderate lifestyle of the title character, this approach is not exactly inappropriate, even if it is at sharp odds with the refined nature of the author’s prose. Although the dramatic challenges posed by the character of narrator Nick Carraway remain problematic, the cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed.

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Set to open the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, five days after its U.S. theatrical bow, the Warner Bros. release stands to receive the full range of critical responses and is backed by an unstinting promotional push to spark big openings, which are far from assured. Its ultimate box office fate, though, will be determined by whether or not the film catches on with younger audiences; it’ll be a matter of the zeitgeist.

PHOTOS: ‘Great Gatsby’ Premiere: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z and Carey Mulligan Hit the Red Carpet

At the very least, Luhrmann must be given credit for delivering a real interpretation of the famous 1925 novel, something not seriously attempted by the previous two big screen adaptations (there was a now-lost 1926 silent version). Paramount’s long-elusive 1949 release, directed by Elliott Nugent , suffered from threadbare production values and uneven performances but Alan Ladd was a terrific Gatsby. The same studio’s second attempt, in 1974, felt suffocating and stillborn; it had the wrong director in Jack Clayton, and Robert Redford was opaque in the title role. A 2000 television adaptation did not make a significant impression.

For many, the thought of Luhrmann tarting up such a revered classic with 3-D, anachronistic Jay Z and Beyonce music, techno-spiced party scenes and Australian locations was sacrilegious, if not criminal. Perhaps even fans of what the director did with William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! might have wondered if he was the right guy to take on the work most often proposed as The Great American Novel.

But no matter how frenzied and elaborate and sometimes distracting his technique may be, Luhrmann’s personal connection and commitment to the material remains palpable, which makes for a film that, most of the time, feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source.

PHOTOS: The Costume and Set Designs of ‘The Great Gatsby’

It begins gently, in patchy black-and-white that, accompanied by somber music, turns into a depth-enhancing color 3-D frame that provides an equivalent for Luhrmann’s previous red curtains and at length gives way to the famous green light at the end of Daisy’s pier. Curiously, we are introduced to Nick ( Tobey Maguire ) as a patient in a sanitarium, where he begins to tell a doctor ( Jack Thompson ) the story of what happened during the summer of 1922.

Luhrmann’s cultural collisions and dislocations then commence as a synthesis of archival footage and CGI (some of which looks to feature the Empire State Building and other yet-to-be-built skyscrapers a decade before their time, and one shot featuring an unlikely copy of James Joyce ‘s Ulysses, which had only just been published in Paris) inflected on the track by modern music, all to the purpose of evoking the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald did so much to name and popularize. A polite lad of modest means trying to find a toehold on Wall Street, Nick was at Yale with rich bruiser Tom Buchanan ( Joel Edgerton ) and has taken a little house in West Egg, Long Island, right across the bay from Tom and his wife, Daisy ( Carey Mulligan ), and in the shadow of the ostentatious mansion owned by the elusive Jay Gatsby.

Everybody from party girls to politicians comes to Gatsby’s extravagant parties, where the booze flows and the music plays and the carousing goes on all night. But no one ever sees the host, whose wealth is surpassed only by his mysteriousness. No one knows where he or his money came from but, during the nocturnal bacchanals, no one much cares.

Luhrmann and his ever-essential design collaborator (and co-producer and wife) Catherine Martin always seem extra-stimulated by such scenes, which involve hundreds of ornate costumes, constant movement and music, which here imposes blends as unlikely as hip hop and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Whether you can abide some of the specific musical choices or not, the way Luhrmann and his music editors mix and match wildly disparate source material is ballsy and impressive; the operating principle is mood and emotion, with a surprise element that can be jarring and/or inspired.

THR COVER: Baz Luhrmann ‘s Despair, Drive and Gamble Behind ‘Great Gatsby’

In time-honored dramatic fashion, Gatsby’s entrance is delayed for a half-hour and, when the moment comes, there’s something in the way it’s shot combined with the self-possessed I-own-the-world smile on Leonardo DiCaprio ‘s face that reminds of the first time you see the young Charles Foster Kane in an earlier film about a fellow with more money than he knows what to do with. This moment and, even more so, in the superb compositions and cutting of Gatsby’s death, show how classically precise Luhrmann can be when he wants to be. Throughout, he photographs DiCaprio the way a movie star used to be shot — glamorously and admiringly, taking full advantage of the charismatic attributes with which only the anointed few are blessed.

Brandishing his favorite phrase, “Old sport,” as well as a slightly affected accent no doubt carefully cultivated to disguise his origins, Gatsby befriends the innocent Nick, whom he asks to arrange a rendezvous with Daisy, his sweetheart from five years earlier when he was a soldier off to Europe and the battlefront. Having already been taken into New York by Tom and his mistress, Myrtle ( Isla Fisher ), for a debauched afternoon, Nick now accompanies Gatsby for lunch at a mixed-race speakeasy with notorious gambling associate Meyer Wolfshiem (curiously impersonated by Indian cinema star Amitabh Bachchan ).

Once Gatsby and Daisy reunite, nearly an hour in, the film settles down a bit to focus on Gatsby’s sincere effort to recapture the girl who got away, who, when he went to war, married rich boy Tom. Gatsby wants to believe they can rewind the clock to the moment when they fell in love, to the purity of what they once had. “If I could just get back to the start,” he says, choosing to ignore Nick’s warning that, “You can’t repeat the past.”

PHOTOS: Baz Luhrmann: Exclusive Portraits of the ‘Great Gatsby’ Director

They do try, organizing a nervous lunch to break the news to Tom, then heading into Manhattan on a sweltering afternoon where, in room at the Plaza, everyone’s truths come tumbling out, followed by tragedy on the road back and, ultimately, in Gatsby’s pool. The precipitating automobile accident is perhaps too sketchily portrayed for full impact, and the final stretch is slowed by too much commentary by Nick, who has become a bit of a bore by now.

Narrator/observer characters like Nick, or Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, are almost always uncomfortable fits onscreen, especially when they’re far more bland and naive than everyone else around them but still prone to making assessments and judgments about people actually living life rather than standing to the side of it. This is exacerbated here by an element of hero worship towards Gatsby that distorts the more wistful, ambivalent attitude conveyed in the book’s final pages. Maguire’s slightly aging boyishness has become tiresome by the film’s second half and a reduction of Nick’s concluding commentary would have helped.

By contrast, we don’t see enough of Daisy’s best friend, the sporty, haughty Jordan Baker, who epitomizes the sort of modern 20th -century woman who has just arrived, newly hatched, in the world and will take from it what she pleases. Australian newcomer Elizabeth Debicki , who, with her towering slim build, black hair and pool-like blue eyes resembles an elongated Zooey Deschanel , is terrific as far as the part goes, but after a few prominent scenes up front, the character recedes.

After a number of roles which, however well acted, may not have been comfortably in his wheelhouse, DiCaprio looks and feels just right as Gatsby; the glamor and allure as at one with his film star persona, he’s sufficiently savvy to convince as a successful bootlegger but still young enough to recapture the hopes and innocence of youth.

VIDEO: New ‘Great Gatsby’ Trailer Offers Beyonce, Lana Del Rey and Platinum Extravagance

Daisy is a difficult character for any actress to embody to everyone’s satisfaction because she’s a woman onto whom the reader tends to project one’s own ideal. Accordingly, viewers will debate whether or not Mulligan has the beauty, the bearing, the dream qualities desired for the part, but she lucidly portrays the desperate tear Daisy feels between her unquestionable love for Gatsby and fear of her husband. Edgerton is excellent as the proud, entitled and seething bully Tom.

Opulence defines the production values, led by Martin’s sets and costumes. As for the use of 3-D by Luhrmann and cinematographer Simon Duggan , it is probably the most naturalistic aspect of the film; only rarely do you notice it in a pronounced way and yet it really does add something to the experience, drawing you in as if escorting you through a series of opening gates, doors and emotional states.

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The Great Gatsby (2013) Review

The Great Gatsby (2013) Director: Baz Luhrmann Cast:  Leonardo di Caprio,  Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan , Emily Foreman , Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isla Fisher Plot :  In the Roaring Twenties, the golden life of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and the hope of a promising future as a writer attract the young and naive Nick Carraway, who will soon find himself in a family drama, when Gatsby will meet again his young lost love, and Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan.

The film starts by introducing the audience to Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he seems to be describing the story of Jay Gatsby to a doctor. We are immediately given an idea of the dissolute lifestyles of the 1920s in the U.S, especially in New York and we find out that Nick had moved there to work on Wall Street, thus seemingly giving up his dream of becoming a writer. The story gets more interesting when we are introduced to the enigmatic and magnetic character of Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and her womanising former college football star husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), as Nick – who is her cousin – goes to her house to have dinner. She’s interesting because unlike many of the other characters she is presented to us as a angel from the outside, and yet is equally corrupted deep down. I was fascinated by the use of white and bright light to introduce her character to the audience because it gave us the idea of something beautiful and out of reach; a beautiful case of foreshadowing from the crew of the film. It was a very good start.

The moments following it were focused on a dinner party sequence cleverly constructed to convey the characters’ shallow approaches to life and their preoccupation with partying, luxury and fun, primarily through rotating camera movements focused on their faces that worked to remove focus from the characters’ words and thus prove them to be irrelevant, but also through how their conversation was interrupted almost immediately after the start of a serious discussion about racial equality. Generally, the movie stuck to this confrontation of outlandish wealth and privilege, and remained attached to telling its story through the flashbacks motivated by Nick’s decision to write a novel about his friend the great Gatsby. A particularly fine technique of presenting this information was the alternation between Nick’s recollection of the events – the words appearing on screen being the words he’s writing down on his manuscript – and the thoughts of Nick as he is at the time he tells the story. In short, the past and present intertwine, creating a sometimes contradictory presentation of events that echoes the reality of memory and hindsight.

What I found most interesting about the structure of the film was that Gatsby himself wasn’t introduced until half an hour into the movie, which I think is a good way of creating suspense given Nick’s pre-existing explanations of the character. Much like Nick’s life, the story moves much faster from the moment Gatsby is introduced to it, and the famously melancholic tone of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel.

A particularly standout moment from the presentation of the picture was the interesting choice from the director of photography to present the flashback of when Daisy and Gatsby first meet through the eyes of another character, Daisy’s friend Jordan. It was a brave choice as by this point in the movie people could have easily gotten tired of waiting for that moment, but it paid off because the build-up and presentation created a tangible chemistry that brought out the performance of the film from Carey Mulligan who conveyed Daisy’s shallow nature and conflicted feeling towards Gatsby with truly admirable craftsmanship.

Mulligan’s character seems ultimately incapable of love, just like her husband, and it’s presented as if a result of their social status and way of life, something Gatsby’s more sentimental and honest nature does not fit into despite his best intentions. As Nick explains: Tom and Daisy don’t care about other people, they just manipulate them for their own fun and amusement. Mulligan’s performance as an angelic yet negative figure that drives Gatsby to his end seems to convey a misogynistic message, reinforced by her actions and words as a shallow rich girl who doesn’t know what she wants and hurts everyone in the process of finding out. In contrast, the film’s narrator Nick, played by Tobey Maguire, was incredibly unlikable.

I was never a fan of Maguire’s work and his performance here did little to change that. At no point did his delivery make me feel involved in the journey his character was explaining and this lack of connection left a bitter taste in the mouth upon the discovery of his character being the only one in the movie to achieve any real success: becoming a writer. Similarly, I wasn’t impressed by Leonardo Di Caprio’s performance as he always seemed too melodramatic in his acting, thus giving the impression of his actions being contrived and simply unnatural. I must admit I enjoyed his performance more than Maguire’s and that it is much easier to sympathise with Gatsby’s character for his troubled life and past, though he does have violent outbursts and seems to consider Daisy his property – just like her husband Tom does.

Generally, as a woman of the 21st century, I fount the portrayal of women to be bordering on sexism and misogyny. Additionally, I felt that the decisions to dose the film with CGI and other special effects despite the loyally period costuming of the characters seemed out of place despite the otherwise impressive cinematography. The soundtrack also suffered from a similar fate whereby the works of classical composers were mixed with modern pop songs by the likes of Lana Del Ray, a general choice that took me out of the picture on several occasions. It seemed like Luhrmann was attempting to recreate the successful hybrid of techniques that made Romeo + Juliet (1996) such a success, but he ultimately failed in capturing the same essences of the original story as he had managed to find in his Shakespeare adaptation.

Overall, The Great Gatsby was a disappointing affair lifted by the work of its cinematographer and particularly Carey Mulligan. For these reasons, I give this film a…

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I hadn’t read the book, so the way everyone was going on about the character, I thought Gatsby was going to be an alien or something. I didn’t realise it was just a book on social class. Oh the disappointment

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The Great Gatsby – review

F Scott Fitzgerald did more for Hollywood than it has done for him. After his first stint in California he wrote the pitiless story, "Crazy Sunday", about an alcoholic screenwriter. In the late 30s came the series of insightful comic tales about the ageing movie hack Pat Hobby, and finally The Last Tycoon , the best, least patronising of novels about the movie industry, all the more intriguing for being unfinished. In return, Hollywood paid him handsomely for a while but treated him without respect and made mediocre movies of his books.

So what of this 3D fourth screen version of The Great Gatsby ? It is, you might say, a story of three eggs. The mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their mansions. Across the bay at East Egg are the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the first world war. After losing her to Buchanan because he was penniless, he now seeks to recapture her. The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture. Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by Michael Winner.

The film's principal figure is not Gatsby but Nick Carraway, a classic unreliable narrator, aged 30 in that summer of 1922, a midwesterner educated at Yale alongside Tom Buchanan and Daisy's second cousin. Nick has taken a cottage next door to Gatsby's mansion while he attempts to establish himself as a stockbroker, and Gatsby uses him as a way of re-engaging with Daisy. Everything we know is mediated by Carraway, and Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce have had the dubious idea of having Carraway tell the story from a sanatorium as a form of therapy on the advice of a psychiatrist.

He's being treated for alcoholism as Fitzgerald was to be, and significantly the date is 29 December 1929. The roaring 20s and the jazz age are over, Wall Street has crashed, and the story is being presented not as the social diagnosis and prophecy that TS Eliot took it to be in 1925 but as history and judgment. (The 1949 film did something similar by having Carraway and the cynically amoral socialite Jordan Baker look back to the 20s from beside Gatsby's grave.) Words float in the air around the befuddled Nick as he works on his book, and lines from the novel are actually written on the camera lens.

If this wasn't bad enough, Tobey Maguire is miscast or misdirected, playing Nick as gauche, uncomfortable, unsophisticated, childlike – less an involved observer than an intruder. This is a film that tramples on Fitzgerald's exquisite prose, turning the oblique into the crude, the suggestively symbolic into the declaratively monumental, the abstract into the flatly real. It's a pared-down novel where the use of "unrestfully" instead of "restlessly" is important, and where Carraway can speak of Jordan "changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete".

Luhrmann has more success with Gatsby, who lurks around the edges the way Harry Lime does in The Third Man , before making his sudden appearance at one of his parties. And Leonardo DiCaprio has some of the fresh, furtive charm of the trainee confidence man trying on suave man-of-the-world roles but regularly revealing the inner decency that, despite his criminal activities, transcends this squalid world of the destructive, thoughtless rich. This is what makes Nick recognise Gatsby as the true upholder of the elusive American Dream and worthy of the final and only tribute he addresses to him: "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Carey Mulligan 's sad, weak, characterless Daisy is also fairly successful, more affecting I think (and with a subtler touch of the south) than Mia Farrow in Jack Clayton's otherwise better-judged 1974 Gatsby .

But if Clayton's film was a little too restrained and sensitive, it is the sheer size, overstatement and noise, both visually and aurally, that sinks Luhrmann's picture. An unpleasant drunken gathering in New York at the cramped flat of Tom Buchanan's mistress becomes a lurid orgy, while the principal party at Gatsby's mansion (which seems inspired by the fairytale palace that is Disney's current logo) is, as Nick tells us, a conflation of several such bootleg bacchanals. But it's less something Coppola (who scripted Clayton's film) or Visconti would have contrived than a demented, ludicrously over-choreographed version of the "Beautiful Girls" montage from Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain . Equally absurd is the cabaret provided by a chorus of black dancers in a speakeasy behind a corner drugstore, a show worthy of Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in 1920s Paris. It's where Nick meets Wolfsheim, Gatsby's middle-aged partner in crime. Wolfsheim, incidentally, has been turned from a Jew into an Indian (played by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan), a foolish change made presumably to fend off the charge of antisemitism.

Beside these larger blunders of taste and scale, such matters as Nick reading Ulysses while apparently still at Yale and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue being performed at a Gatsby gathering two years before it was written seem unimportant. But there is one scene that works well, and that's the crucial confrontation between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby in front of Nick, Daisy and Jordan in a suite at the Plaza hotel one hot afternoon. There is tension and depth here. Would that Luhrmann had included the funeral and the meeting between Nick and Gatsby's elderly, working-class father from the book's final chapter.

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the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

The Great Gatsby

Image from The Great Gatsby - Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan

The Great Gatsby [2013] : Baz Luhrmann’s movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel , The Great Gatsby , was held in much anticipation among the likes of literature junkies, DiCaprio fanatics, and box office skeptics. With a film that proceeds a handful of remakes decades apart, this 2013 version had critics doubting Luhrmann’s rendition measurable to the 1974 Gatsby movie starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow–which there might, in perspective, have been a good reason to do so. The Great Gatsby tells the story of the mysterious Jay Gatsby ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) as he attempts to rekindle the flame of his lost love, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), set within the backdrop of the roaring 1920’s and narrated by his neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Luhrmann is no stranger to the melodramatic and theatrical, his claim to fame being the bedazzled, marquee-lit Red Curtain Trilogy ( Strictly Ballroom , Romeo + Juliet , and Moulin Rouge ), and it is no surprise that he incorporates his colorful, confetti-sprinkled touch on this classic novel-turned-film.

Gilded Butterflies: Elaborate set designs, costumes, and filming techniques create an aesthetic that is visually pleasing to an audience with a short attention span, however, some of these gaudy additions completely defeat the purpose of the story itself. The first half of the film neglects any character development or plot progression and serves as an opportunity to include as much unnecessary camera effects, unbearably long dance numbers/party scenes, and flashy CGI as possible . Where’s the heart? Where’s the very soul that made The Great Gatsby an American classic in the first place? It’s buried beneath a mess of feathers, sparkles, and fizzy remnants of bar fights. Yes, it was a time of drinking and partying, but you don’t need to stretch it out to about three different scenes featuring 5+ minutes-worth of senseless party shots, some not even featuring any of the main characters themselves. A story needs substance–not just the alcoholic variety.

Speeding Past the Golden Age: The Great Gatsby’s soundtrack has been a topic of much debate regarding the use of contemporary music in today’s hip-hop/rap charts. Luhrmann has mentioned in previous interviews that the inclusion of rap music was to mirror the impact jazz music had during the 1920s, and how rap/hip-hop evokes the same outburst and vivacity in the present era as jazz once did. With that being said, why not just have jazz music? Hearing Kanye West and Beyoncé play within the scenes of the film makes it seem out of place, and dissevers the nostalgic antiquity given by the sepia-tinged interlude misleadingly played during the opening credits of the movie. It’s hilarious in the worst way when you have Tobey Maguire reiterating how the early stock market was booming, with vintage newspaper headlines, and pixelated Wall Street “footage,” all while Jay-Z is rapping some irrelevant minutia that references stars like Taylor Swift in the verses. Something tells me that Swift wasn’t a popular topic of conversation in 1925. Speaking of Jay-Z, his music shows up so frequently in the film that one has to wonder how he convinced the production team to let him–Oh, wait, he’s an executive producer! There are just some things you don’t need to know. The one saving grace from the soundtrack is the film’s lead single, “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey , which does get exhausted during all the romantic montages, but retains some of the much-needed class the soundtrack was lacking.

Better on Paper: All the bookish cinema-goers will be glad to know passages from the novel are voiced verbatim by Tobey Maguire in Peter Parker-esque voice-overs harking back to the Spider-Man Trilogy. The symbolic green light by Daisy’s house and the optometrist billboard in the Valley of the Ashes also make prominent appearances, but their constant emphasis leaves viewers who have not read the novel a little confused about their significance and why the camera keeps zooming in on a sign with a pair of eyeglasses on it. Overall, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby abandoned all the redeemable qualities of Fitzgerald’s original, character-driven story, and focused more on the secondary visual aspects instead. Although attempting to stay close to the book’s premise, the screen adaptation just leaves the audience members disengaged. Sure, the pretty lights and colors may temporarily awe the easily-pleased, but in the long-run, The Great Gatsby will not live up to its former hype.

In reference to Lana Del Rey’s haunting ballad, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” And the answer is: No. No, we will not.

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

Watch The Great Gatsby on Amazon or iTunes

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

‘The Great Gatsby’ (2013) Movie Review

By Brad Brevet

In 1974, Jack Clayton brought F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to the big screen and the film suffered from sticking too close to the source material. Characters rattled off passages of prose from Fitzgerald’s now 88-year-old classic that ultimately fell flat as the film could neither capture the mood or feel the book was able to instill in its readers. With his interpretation of The Great Gatsby , sensory director Baz Luhrmann doesn’t have to worry about his film being tonally flat, but the best description I can come up with is to call it a fascinating misfire, with mountainous peaks and valleys. Is that a recommendation? You be the judge.

Considering his signature, over-the-top approach, Luhrmann may be the best choice to give such a tragic story a jolt of energy. However, Luhrmann has a hard time meshing his vision with the variety of beats the narrative is required to hit and development of character necessary to keep an audience invested.

Beginning, as the book does, with narration from Nick Carraway ( Tobey Maguire ), the story is told in a series of flashbacks, with bits of strained voiceover here and there. For the life of me I’ll never understand this decision in movies when it comes to adapting novels told in the first person. It’s a sign of lazy storytellers, unwilling to go the extra mile to find a way to get a story’s themes across without a character telling the audience what they are.

Carraway is an unreliable narrator, and I would understand the decision here if this was to be explored to some end, but his words are better served dissected on the page. Amid lavish parties and the spectacle that is Jay Gatsby they serve little purpose here other than to halt the momentum of the film and serve as chapter breaks where none is necessary.

The opening moments of the film, therefore, are of little consequence until Luhrmann provides a not-so-subtle introduction to our main protagonist, Jay Gatsby, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio . Something of a mystery man of wealth who’s built his empire in West Egg so he could keep an eye on the love of his life across the water. DiCaprio fits right into the role — suave, nervous, yet gentlemanly and endlessly charming — and the goofy introduction to his character and the big grin on DiCaprio’s face as he says, “I’m Gatsby,” inspires laughter as much as it does a sense of fun, but this is also where the film runs into issues.

The same lavish party introduction of Gatsby is also the first sign the film’s editing isn’t in tune with its music. One of The Great Gatsby ‘s strong suits is its soundtrack, but the pulse of the music doesn’t march to the same beat as the images on screen. Party goers appear to be moving to a different drum and energy is lost. Additionally, the pacing is never more off than the introduction of Daisy Buchanan ( Carey Mulligan ), slowly revealed amidst a flurry of billowing drapes that seems to go on forever.

Luhrmann is clearly a visual storyteller, but with The Great Gatsby he seems to be overcompensating and forgetting something very important… his characters. Yes, part of this story is an emphasis on the emptiness of the lives these people lead and most certainly Daisy and her husband Tom ( Joel Edgerton ) are quite empty, just as are the majority of the people surrounding them and those attending Gatsby’s parties.

This is where a novel and a movie must part ways. While characters may be able to exist on the peripheral in the novel or an overall sense of character can be understood in a brief monologue on the page, a character can’t simply exist on screen without some sense as to why they are there. If a director is willing to disregard his/her characters the audience will do the same. That is, unless an actor can somehow break free of a film’s narrative constraints.

DiCaprio is the center of the story. This film is Gatsby round-the-clock and I have no problem with that. DiCaprio is great in the role and a fascinating character to observe. Maguire is a dud. As his character says, he’s “within and without”, though I would suggest more without than within. Maguire does nothing more than bring an adolescent nature to his character that could have been achieved by anyone, though I believe some measure of greatness could have been found in Carraway from an actor with more imagination.

Isla Fisher ‘s Myrtle Wilson and her husband George ( Jason Clarke ) are forgotten almost entirely outside of an introduction and the fateful third act.

Then there’s Jordan Baker played by Rooney Mara look-a-like Elizabeth Debicki . I guess there’s a reason Warner Bros. is giving her credit in the film’s marketing and it wasn’t simply to give online movie bloggers one more character poster to talk about.

Gatsby is only Debicki’s second feature film and she is every bit as memorable as DiCaprio’s Gatsby. Her relationship with Nick isn’t nearly as emphasized as it was in the book and, by comparison, I’d say it’s non-existent. Yet, she manages to light up the room when she’s on screen, be it with a look or whispered comment.

Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce ( Moulin Rouge! ) understand The Great Gatsby can’t be interpreted on screen exactly as Fitzgerald wrote it, but I can’t say I entirely understand their points of emphasis or all the decisions they’ve made. I also grew frustrated with on the nose moments of narration or character voiceover from “The eyes of God are always watching” and, straight from the book, “They were careless people.” The great thing about movies is these things don’t need to be said as much as they’ll be understood if a director has told an accomplished story and, for better or worse, I think Luhrmann underestimated his ability to tell this story.

The Great Gatsby is, without a doubt, too long and yet it isn’t a disaster. Neither is it a great film or even really a good one for that matter. I did, however, love DiCaprio and Debicki as well as the themes that shine through even though Luhrmann felt compelled to overplay them. I do believe Luhrmann is the right director to give this story a life unlike what is found in the pages of Fitzgerald’s book and had he given his characters a little more attention and played with the narrative just a little more he may have had a hit.

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the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

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the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

Review by brian eggert may 10, 2013.

The Great Gatsby

An over-stylized and under-thought adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal novel, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby features a number of excellent performances from a gorgeous cast, all undone by Luhrmann’s characteristically bloated production. Another of the Moulin Rouge director’s post-modern attempts to infuse the old with the new, the film contains none of the nuances of Fitzgerald’s novel; every chance for subtlety is replaced by Luhrmann’s need for high-energy ornamentation. This version may not be as categorically dull as the 1974 version starring Robert Redford, but incorporating 3-D effects, modern music from the likes of Kanye West and Lana Del Rey, choppier cutting than a Michael Bay movie, and endlessly repeated visual metaphors wasn’t what Fitzgerald’s tale needed to make it relatable for modern viewers.

Full of glitz and glam, the film opens with narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) inexplicably recounting his experiences with Jay Gatsby from a sanitarium, a storytelling device that not only unnecessarily frames the narrative but diverts from the book (there’s no mention of a sanitarium in Fitzgerald’s text). His doctor (Jack Thompson) advises him to write down his woes, and throughout the remainder of the picture, there’s cause for Luhrmann to project Nick’s scribblings and typewriter letters onto the screen in an overused visual motif. But then Luhrmann films The Great Gatsby with many such overused motifs. As Nick sets the stage of New York in the twenties, he describes the coal-ridden town just outside of the city and describes a forgotten billboard advertising a forgotten optometrist, the image of a spectacled figure provides symbolism for how God sees all. And from thereon out, anytime someone mentions God in the film, Luhrmann cuts to the billboard in a most repetitive stroke.

For those forgetting their obligatory high school reading, the story follows Nick meeting his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) in New York circa 1922. A failed writer who’s moved to the city to sell bonds, Nick rents a small house next to a Xanadu owned by the fabled, mysterious Gatsby. After dining with Daisy, her unfaithful husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), and Daisy’s best friend, Jordan (newcomer Elizabeth Debicki, quite good), he hears stories about the unexplained origins of Gatsby’s wealth and past. Soon Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby’s elaborate parties, and the man reveals himself to Nick. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Gatsby’s entrance in this scene is splendid and appropriately charismatic, and DiCaprio’s performance only grows more complicated as the story progresses and the mystique about Gatsby slowly fades into that of an idealistic impostor who wants only to rekindle his love with Daisy. Both Nick and Gatsby learn that romanticism has no place in a world of riches and materialism.

The film’s finest touches belong to the cast, headlined by the melancholy Maguire in a role similar to those he had in The Ice Storm , The Cider House Rules , and Wonder Boys . Even in his thirties, he still can manage that innocence-lost persona that has suited him so well before. DiCaprio embodies Gatsby’s most suave moments and his most fragile, perfectly balancing the character’s artifice with his blind optimism. Mulligan and Edgerton are both excellent, the former a seemingly endearing type and the latter exactly what he appears to be. Jason Clarke (from Zero Dark Thirty ) appears as Gatsby’s killer George B. Wilson, and Isla Fisher is juicy as Wilson’s doomed wife, Myrtle. Overall, it’s an attractive cast that’s ultimately overshadowed by Lurhmann’s invasive decorations and jumpy style, which do a criminal disservice not only to the actors but to Fitzgerald’s intended purposes for the book.

With Romeo + Juliet (1996), Luhrmann’s over-amped style modernized Shakespeare’s play into an accessible tale, and the gamble worked because, as history has proved, the Bard is universal. Fitzgerald’s essential critique of American opulence is enhanced by the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties’ excess in New York City—the jazzy parties, ever-flowing alcohol, and other documented freedoms. Luhrmann’s production brings the era to life through bright colors and CGI backgrounds and seems to relish this aspect of the story more than any other. But his application of modern style into a period-specific setting is uneven throughout the film, detrimentally so. In the earliest scenes, the editing allows no more than a microsecond between cuts, barely allowing us to absorb the details of shimmering confetti and Art Deco designs. The integration of modern music into the soundtrack is also annoyingly inconsistent: sometimes he uses Craig Armstrong’s traditional score; sometimes old-timey tunes like “Let’s Misbehave”; and then out of nowhere comes “100$ Bill” by Jay-Z.

In the end, it’s evident that Lurhmann refuses to commit to the cynical worldview of Fitzgerald’s book by changing a key detail in Gatsby’s death. Lurhmann allows Gatsby a moment of hope before he dies at the thought of Daisy calling him, and therein misses the cold despair presented in the novel. This isn’t much of a surprise, since Lurhmann knows little of restraint or subtlety. More than his exaggerated vibes or inconsistent mood, the ending is perhaps the director’s greatest misstep in his screenplay co-written by Craig Pearce. However noble it is to attempt an adaptation of The Great Gatsby for the modern age, Lurhmann’s over-the-top and certainly overwrought approach may be refreshingly unconventional to some, but it fails to achieve Nick’s crucial observer status as “within and without” by delighting far too much in the billowing decadence of the setting. Lurhmann seems more interested in repeating his Moulin Rouge success in another fusion of pop music and history than truly embracing the themes of Fitzgerald’s novel.

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Review: The Great Gatsby (Film)

Review: The Great Gatsby (Film)

Movie directed by BAZ LUHRMANN Reviewed by LISA ALEXANDER

The Great Gatsby (Film)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby is a simple story at heart: poor boy meets rich girl and, by dint of superhuman perseverance, transcends his origins only to find out it doesn’t matter because her kind will never accept him anyway. This slender novel has become shorthand for the Zeitgeist of the Twenties. Its language is flowery, even hothouse, Fitzgerald’s voice lush. Yet, using a detached character as narrator, Fitzgerald knits atmosphere, recurring objects, patterns, and themes into an iconic drama about the ringing failure of the American dream and a contender for The Great American Novel. Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of Gatsby is the third major film version and, though this Gatsby is a fun ride, its emphasis on spectacle muddies Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Luhrmann merengued onto the scene with Strictly Ballroom, his wild movie about the extreme and eccentric world of dance competitions in small-town Australia Set featured image . As often happens, this talented director’s first film was the perfect vehicle, and subsequent subjects have been a tougher fit. I liked best his post-apocalyptic Romeo and Juliet, which had flashes of brilliance–Juliet’s bier lit by thousands of candles, Romeo’s first sight of her through an aquarium, the pool scene, and the incandescent performances of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Luhrmann was famously faithful to  Shakespeare’s text, which withstood his visual barrage. Romeo and Juliet , a play about the universal intensity of young love, doesn’t depend on place. Not so The Great Gatsby . Location is Fitzgerald’s forte. He writes about wealth and power through real estate.

A film director has a responsibility when adapting a classic to stay true to the vision of the book. I don’t think small changes matter; I welcome them if they make a movie work better. The best adaptations ( The English Patient , The Talented Mr. Ripley ) enhance the story so that its essence comes into focus through the camera lens and the interpretative powers of film. The hope is for a symphonic version of the book, where before it was a solo performance. Put another way, film offers the possibility of going from 2D to 3D (in a good way).

This Gatsby is 3-D all right—literally and figuratively. Luhrmann is not a subtle director. If you’re going to eat this cake, you’d better like a whole lot of icing. This isn’t the jazz age; it’s the jazz age on Adderall.

The movie is a visual riot, and a pretty damn pleasurable one: Leonardo DiCaprio in 3-D, snow falling all around you, butterflies and fireworks and dancers close enough to touch. But Luhrmann’s fawning attention to spectacle caricatures each place in the story, and that’s my main concern.

From one block to another in the same neighborhood, most of us are aware of the signs of success or failure that real estate gives off, even without the wattage of that view or this pool. In Fitzgerald’s novel, East Egg is the old-money enclave where Jay Gatsby’s love, Daisy, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, live. West Egg, across Long Island Sound, is where Gatsby builds his palace, a new-money place in transition.

In this version, narrator Nick Carraway’s West Egg rental is homey as a hobbit house straight out of Tolkien. Gatsby’s turreted monstrosity of an estate next door (a mash up of McMansion, Scientology Headquarters, and yes, Snow White’s Castle) has all the taste of Disney with rows of oil paintings and Busby Berkeley dancers peeling off into the pool. The gardens of Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s East Egg spread are curiously reminiscent of Versailles, while the Valley of Ashes looks like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. All this is so Vegas-y, so over the top, so Jay Z (who’s an executive producer and responsible for the sound track), that the nuances of wealth get all mushed together.

If East Egg is as lurid as West Egg, what’s the point? Colorized grass and crenulated houses come at the expense of credibility. Would Daisy, well bred as she is, really go for this Vegas across the Sound? Why does her house scream Kardashian if she is a Louisville debutante? And why doesn’t any of this look remotely like moneyed Long Island?

In a nation of immigrants, most wealth is relatively new. Yet we’ve created  our own dynasties of Haves and Have-Nots. The nuances of wealth are Fitzgerald’s primary interest, as epitomized by West Egg and East Egg and the Valley of the Ashes, and it’s important that Baz Luhrman get that right.

Fitzgerald had an upper-middle-class upbringing. He also went to Princeton and married a debutante. He knew wealth from the perspective of someone who had entrée, though he struggled with money problems all his life. Nick Carraway is exquisitely sensitive to the ins and outs of money. But what we’re seeing here isn’t Fitzgerald or Nick’s point of view, it’s Luhrmann’s. This director gives us wealth from the outside looking in, and that’s the problem. He’s too childlike, too impressed, too voyeuristic, and his Gatsby ends up looking like a steroid-enhanced episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or The Bachelor.

Luhrmann also takes pretty big liberties with plot and form, some more successful than others. He frames the story as written by Nick in rehab, a move that adds zero to the narrative. In a more fortuitous change, Luhrmann excises the character of Michaelis, the coffee-shop owner in the Valley of the Ashes who talks to Myrtle’s husband, George, after she is killed in a car accident. This actually strengthens the story because Daisy’s husband, Tom, ends up being the one who suggests to George that Gatsby is responsible for Myrtle’s death. George then shoots Gatsby.

Luhrmann makes another significant change at the end. In the book, Gatsby is abandoned by Daisy and shot in his pool. In Luhrmann’s version, the phone rings, and Gatsby leaps to the conclusion that it’s Daisy, just before he’s shot. Nick says that Gatsby is the most hopeful person he’s ever met. This shift lets that hope live.

In the face of Luhrmann’s stagey direction, only DiCaprio’s performance cuts through the overkill. His finely calibrated Gatsby gives us the man’s painful contradictions in detail after detail: the compulsive smoothing of his hair, the tight crossing of his legs, the royal wave, the fastening of that high suit button as if rearranging himself into a more correct version, as well as hints of brutality in his hushed asides with the gangsters who always seem to be just off-screen. The other actors try their best, but seem unable to transcend the stylized movements, the clipped dialogue, and the frenetic dance of the camera. If this movie has heart, it belongs to DiCaprio.

In a 1922 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald wrote that he wanted to create “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” In this version, you can check off extraordinary, beautiful and intricately patterned if not simple.

I admit to enjoying Luhrmann’s candy-box aesthetic. Watching the film is kind of like eating that box of violently colored meringues, knowing they’ll make your teeth ache. I just wish Luhrmann had been more willing to take a back seat to the author. He obviously respects Fitzgerald’s intention. In chats on his website, he talks about “making the best version of Gatsby for our time.” He lists a long string of research books, worthy of a doctoral scholar. His home page features a coat of arms bearing the motto: “A life lived with fear is a life half lived.” Fear of what? That he’d mess up this book? That fear might have been a good one to keep.

Lisa Alexander is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared, among other places, in Cimarron Review and won the UCLA James Kirkwood Award in Creative Writing. She was nominated for an Emmy for executive producing a mini series adaptation of The Mists of Avalon .

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The Great Gatsby

2013, Drama, 2h 22m

What to know

Critics Consensus

While certainly ambitious -- and every bit as visually dazzling as one might expect -- Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby emphasizes visual splendor at the expense of its source material's vibrant heart. Read critic reviews

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The great gatsby   photos.

Midwest native Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) arrives in 1922 New York in search of the American dream. Nick, a would-be writer, moves in next-door to millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and across the bay from his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton). Thus, Nick becomes drawn into the captivating world of the wealthy and -- as he bears witness to their illusions and deceits -- pens a tale of impossible love, dreams, and tragedy.

Rating: PG-13 (Partying|Brief Language|Sexual Content|Smoking|Some Violent Images)

Genre: Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Producer: Baz Luhrmann , Catherine Martin , Douglas Wick , Lucy Fisher , Catherine Knapman

Writer: Baz Luhrmann , Craig Pearce

Release Date (Theaters): May 10, 2013  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 14, 2015

Box Office (Gross USA): $144.8M

Runtime: 2h 22m

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Production Co: Bazmark Films, Red Wagon Entertainment

Sound Mix: SDDS, Dolby Digital, Datasat

Cast & Crew

Leonardo DiCaprio

Tobey Maguire

Nick Carraway

Carey Mulligan

Daisy Buchanan

Joel Edgerton

Tom Buchanan

Isla Fisher

Myrtle Wilson

Jason Clarke

George Wilson

Amitabh Bachchan

Meyer Wolfshiem

Elizabeth Debicki

Jordan Baker

Adelaide Clemens

Vince Colosimo

Richard Carter

Steve Bisley

David Furlong

Walter Chase

Callan McAuliffe

Teenage Jay Gatsby

Felix Williamson

Baz Luhrmann

Screenwriter

Craig Pearce

Catherine Martin

Douglas Wick

Lucy Fisher

Catherine Knapman

Barrie M. Osborne

Executive Producer

Bruce Berman

Simon Duggan

Cinematographer

Film Editing

Jason Ballantine

Jonathan Redmond

Craig Armstrong

Original Music

Production Design

Supervising Art Direction

Damien Drew

Art Director

Michael Turner

News & Interviews for The Great Gatsby

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Parental Guidance: One Direction: This is Us and Getaway

RT on DVD & Blu-Ray: The Great Gatsby , Pain & Gain , and More

Critic Reviews for The Great Gatsby

Audience reviews for the great gatsby.

I really enjoyed the visual aspect of this movie. The acting was also very good.

the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

I was thoroughly unimpressed in more ways than one with Baz Lurhmann's take on one of the nation's greatest novels, The Great Gatsby. Considering Lurhmann has had moderate success with Moulin Rouge! and Romeo & Juliet (where he worked with DiCaprio before) it's disappointing how this adaptation could fall so flat with such powerful stars. While the movie sticks to the source material for the most part, I didn't need the narration from Tobey Maguire the entire time like I was actually reading the book. First, I have never been completely sold on Maguire. I don't think he's a bad actor, but he didn't give any characterization to Nick Carraway. The same goes for most of the actors in this film, including DiCaprio. Nobody's performance deserves any special attention because it felt so cookie-cutter that you might have thought the actors were only showing emotion because of the punctuation on the script they were reading. I know this was a few years ago, but Leo was coming off some of his best movies, and then this interrupted one of the better strings of successful movies for him. Carey Mulligan is always a delight on screen, but other than crying, sobbing or appearing confused, there wasn't much else for her to do. Nothing came together for me while I was watching. Scenes cut in and out of flashbacks. Editing was abysmal. Continuity between scenes was a joke. What was the deal with trying to fuse current music into a movie based in the 1920s? None of it felt right. It was pretty much watching an audio book on screen with all the narration we were drug through and when we finally had a chance to watch what was happening on screen without listening to someone tell us about it, the scenes were filled with awkward pauses and stilted dialogue. Even though Luhrmann stayed faithful to the material, never at any point did I believe it was on par with the magic I read back in high school from Fitzgerald.

Baz Luhrman's signature style works wonderfully with the source material, capturing the eclectic energy of Fitzgerald's masterpiece without sacrificing the tender emotion and depth of character that made the book so wonderful.

From an insane asylum (wait, what?), Nick Carraway narrates the story of a socialite's attempts to woo his long-lost love. Baz Luhrmann's lavish style, quick cuts, garish colors, and modern screaming, drum-heavy music attempt to capture the roar of the Roaring Twenties. It's a valiant attempt, and I like when it succeeds and don't get too angry when the style rudely overtakes the story. It's mostly faithful to the source material except for a few glaring dissimilarities that make me wonder if the filmmakers simply felt the need to stamp the story with their spin. Leonardo DiCaprio is good as Gatsby, capturing the lavishness of his excess and the vulnerability of relationship with Daisy, and Tobey Maguire is fine as literature's most famous witness; although, Maguire isn't allowed to express the appropriate moral outrage at the end of the film. Likewise, the script doesn't give enough to Carey Mulligan to expose Daisy's depth. Overall, it's a fair attempt, but Luhrmann's luridness is often misplaced.

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“The Great Gatsby”: Try Again, Old Sport

“The Great Gatsby” Try Again Old Sport

It would be fun not to know that Baz Luhrmann’s new movie is an adaptation, not to have read the book that it’s an adaptation of, not to bother comparing the movie to its source or evaluating its fidelity to or imaginative reinterpretation of the novel, but simply to watch “The Great Gatsby” as a movie that brings some notable actors together in a sumptuously-realized Jazz Age extravaganza to tell a tumble of good stories—of a lost love fleetingly recaptured, a couple of marriages unhinged, a crime unsolved, lives violently lost, a fledgling romance dissolved, the disillusionment of a New York newcomer, and, overall, of the end of a time of fabled exuberance—by way of vividly conceived characters and finely rhetorical dialogue. It wouldn’t make the resulting movie any better, but it would at least make for a source of wonder that an early-twenty-first-century screenwriter could offer up such a rich lode of material, regardless of the use made of it.

Yet, unlike the “Quixote” of Pierre Menard—the latter-day word-for-word recreation of the novel that, Borges joked, would be an even greater act of imagination than is Cervantes’s account of his contemporary world—Fitzgerald’s “Gatsby” would still be a greater achievement than that of Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, for the same reason that the novel became widely acclaimed and popular decades after its own time. “The Great Gatsby,” which was published in 1925, is a work of brilliant, fine-tuned clairvoyance—it sounded the death knell for a generation that was still alive. Beside the book’s intrinsically romantic qualities (and a doomed romance is often even more popularly romantic than one that works out), it reveals how Prohibition—which became the law of the land in 1919—infected the American character and offers a dim view of the financial markets that foreshadows the 1929 crash. The book is a cautionary tale that was offered to readers who, at the time, sought no caution. In the retrospective post-Depression view, however, “The Great Gatsby” all made perfect sense, its iridescent beauty and poetic fancy appearing as no more than a bright and floating bubble that, as everyone knew, had catastrophically burst. It’s easy to be cautionary after things go to hell; Fitzgerald saw, and warned of, hell breaking through the collective illusion of paradise.

The filmmakers’ most audacious creation is a framing story that renders the book’s predictive power explicit: that of Nick Carraway, who, in December, 1929, checks into a clinic to get off alcohol and to get over an apparent breakdown (or what Fitzgerald, writing about his own mental and physical crisis in 1936, called his “Crack Up”). In the clinic, Nick is induced by his doctor to delve into his past—by means of writing—and, supplied with a typewriter, he undertakes a retrospective view of his life as it led to his collapse and begins it with the first words of “The Great Gatsby,” which, as he writes the words, becomes the story that’s shown on screen. The framing device sets the movie explicitly in the context of the burst Wall Street bubble and the nation’s collective breakdown, the economic collapse as well as the rampant gangsterism that was a mere sanguinary trickle in the novel’s 1922 setting but which, by the late twenties, became a world-famous bloodletting. (Fascinatingly, the 1949 film of the novel updates the action to 1928 and sets it explicitly in the milieu of gangland murders and the Wall Street boom-time “gravy train”—and also establishes Nick Carraway as a former aspiring writer.)

The conceit of Nick Carraway as the stand-in for Fitzgerald may not be quite exact, though. Famously, Fitzgerald himself had lost an early but great love due to his own poverty and then, soon thereafter and quickly, made a big pile of money—but let Fitzgerald tell the story, as he did in 1936, in the autobiographical essay “Handle with Care” (the sequel to the title essay of the book “The Crack-Up”):

It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out all right for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.

In other words, Fitzgerald had been in love with Ginevra King , who instead married a wealthy young man. Soon thereafter, Fitzgerald, a successful writer, married Zelda Sayre. Nick Carraway may have learned where his friends’ money came from and headed back to the Midwest (so did Fitzgerald, in the summer of 1919, where he wrote “This Side of Paradise”), but Fitzgerald returned to New York with “the jingle of money in his pocket” and became a Gatsby-like overnight grandee of wild parties.

Fitzgerald’s literary and personal conception of the aphrodisiac power of money, though, was remote to two of the most important writers of the day—D. H. Lawrence, and Fitzgerald’s friend Ernest Hemingway, whose prime themes are virility and vitality, the physical energy and mental discipline which carry a sexual charge. In effect, they wrote of the higher animal prowling around the edges of a society and making incursions; Fitzgerald, however, wrote of society, remained an insider, and his view of social gamesmanship and the finely-calibrated inflections and higher frequencies with which insiders speak to each other—and the forceful desires that those glittering games both conceal and express—is the essence of his poetic vision of the world, the charm of his despair.

The problem with Luhrmann’s film is that it’s under the top. For all of its lurching and gyrating party scenes, for all the inflated pomp of the Gatsby palace and the Buchanan mansion, for all the colorful clothing and elaborate personal styling, Luhrmann takes none of it seriously, and makes none of it look remotely alluring, enticing, fun. His whizzing 3-D cinematography offers lots of motion but no seduction; his parties are turbulent and raucous without being promising, without holding out the allure of magical encounters. They’re in the story, of course, those encounters—there’s no story without them—but Luhrmann, a man of his times, has no patience for mystery, no sense of true and brazen immodesty. He may have spent a lot of money to put his grandiose vision of the novel onto the screen, but he seems to be apologizing for it in advance. There was something in that most profligate night life, in the obscenely indulgent expenditures of the rich on destructive amusements for themselves and their friends and the hangers-on, that had a diabolical appeal to Fitzgerald—but it has none for Luhrmann, and the movie offers none.

The same is true of the casting and the acting. Leonardo DiCaprio has the laser-fix eyebeams and the megawatt smile, but not the sense of being—which Fitzgerald mentions in the book—“an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” DiCaprio’s speech, with its J.F.K.-tinged accent, is simply and patently absurd, and there’s no roughness whatsoever to his character, none of life’s burrs or scrapes, no tinge of real power. And he’s the best among the principals. Carey Mulligan, though a fine actress, is simply overmatched by the part of Daisy Buchanan; she doesn’t invest the character with style or with substance, doesn’t have a sufficiently high-handed irony or sense of intimate secrecy. She plays the role entirely out front, as if in keeping with a cynical conception—in keeping with Luhrmann’s superficial churning of the party scenes—of the young woman of impossible dreams being an ordinary person of not-unusual substance or character whose wonder exists only in Gatsby’s fantastic visions. Here, too, Luhrmann—unlike Fitzgerald—is unable to take society seriously, to recognize the extraordinary character that extraordinary manners both hide and (for those attuned to them) display. Joel Edgerton brings crude weight to the character of Tom Buchanan but not the refinement of wealth; as Nick Carraway, Tobey Maguire plays a bit too bewildered, too awkward and unknowing. The simplicity of Luhrmann’s conception filters into their portrayals.

That notion brings to mind what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s most famous sentence, from the essay “The Crack-Up,” in which, preparing to describe his own breakdown, he adds:

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

The movie conveys the sense of waste but not of what was wasted, of the superfluous but not of excess, and of the phony but not of the gloriously theatre of life. In its reductive way, it not only doesn’t display two opposed ideas; it offers no ideas at all.

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If you've looked up The Great Gatsby movie, you've probably realized that there is more than one. So which of The Great Gatsby movies you should watch? Wondering if you can skip reading the book?

We have a complete guide to each of the Great Gatsby movie adaptations, as well as some advice for writing about the movies!

The Great Gatsby Movies 101

Gatsby has had four film adaptations, with two especially big-budget, well-known movies: the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and the 2013 film with Leonardo DiCaprio. There was also a silent film adaptation made in 1926, just one year after the novel came out , but that film has been lost, with only a one-minute trailer that survives to attest to its existence.

Some elements of the film adaptations have strongly influenced people's vision and understanding of the novel, but there isn't one "best" Great Gatsby movie or one best Great Gatsby cast, or even one movie that has fully captured the spirit of the novel . (Compare this with To Kill a Mockingbird , which has just one major film adaptation that many consider not only worthy of the book, but also to be one of the best movies of all time.)

So, to be clear: none of the Great Gatsby movies can replace the experience of reading the novel . And there isn't even one obvious choice for the best adaptation to watch!

However, watching one (or, if you're ambitious, all!) of the adaptations in addition to reading the book can help you visualize the characters, recognize the sheer grandeur of Gatsby's parties, and appreciate some of the larger themes of the book. Here are a few pros and cons to watching a Great Gatsby film.

Advantages of Watching the Great Gatsby Movies

Great performances. Although spread across the four different movies, each of the main characters in Gatsby gets at least one stellar performance, from Alan Ladd's Jay Gatsby to Sam Waterston's Nick Carraway to Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan. Watching the actors bring these characters to life can help you appreciate these characters' best lines, motivations, and outcomes. This can, in turn, help you write better essays about The Great Gatsby !

Stunning visuals. Gatsby is often praised for its straightforward, descriptive writing, but it can be nice to see a filmmaker's vision of, say, one of Jay Gatsby's extravagant parties rather than just imagining the orchestra, the drinks, and the partygoers, in your head. Not only does this help you appreciate the incredible decadence of the 1920s, and specifically the wealthy characters in the novel, it can also help you appreciate a visual detail you may have missed on your first read-through of the book.

Appreciation of the key lines. When you're reading a book to yourself, sometimes you may find yourself skimming over a line or passage that actually contains a really important piece of dialogue or characterization. Watching a movie adaptation, and hearing the lines the screenwriter chose to adapt and highlight, can help you catch and appreciate some of Gatsby 's most iconic phrases.

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Reasons to Avoid Watching Any of These Movies

Time commitment.

You're going to have to budget at least an hour and a half, but likely more, if you want to watch a Gatsby movie. The runtimes for each of the movies is as follows:

  • 1949 Version—91 Minutes
  • 1974 Version—149 minutes
  • 2000 Version—90 minutes
  • 2013 Version—142 minutes

Especially with the incredibly busy schedules many students have these days, it could be hard to find the time to devote two and a half hours to watching a Gatsby movie, on top of the time it takes to read the book.

Also, keep in mind the book is relatively short—in the time it takes to watch one of the movies you could easily read at least half of the book.

Inaccuracies and Deviations From the Novel

Obviously, no movie can perfectly adapt a book, so everything from small details (like Daisy's hair color) to large plot events (like Tom blatantly telling George that Gatsby is the killer in the 2013 film) can be changed. This could be a problem if you mix up a scene that occurred only in one of the movies with something from the book when working on an assignment.

Mistaking the Director's Vision for Fitzgerald's

With any film, the director (along with the screenwriter, cinematographer, actors, and the rest of the crew) has a certain version or message that she brings to life. This can get a bit complicated in book adaptations, since a book—especially one as rich and layered as Gatsby—can contain a variety of messages and themes, but a director might choose to highlight just one or two.

As a brief example, the 1949 movie emphasizes Gatsby's criminal enterprises and can almost read like a morality tale. But the 2013 movie puts Gatsby and Daisy's failed love affair front and center.

The potential issue with this is that if you watch just one movie, and skip the book, you could totally miss a larger theme that the book clearly shows, like the false hope of the American Dream, contentious race relations in the 1920s, or the inability to truly recapture the past. In short, make sure you understand that while a movie has to focus on just one or two themes to be coherent, a book can present many more, and you definitely have to read Gatsby to understand the various themes it touches on.

With those pros and cons in mind, you can read on to learn more about each film adaptation to decide if you want to watch one (or all of them!).

After the summaries, we'll have some advice for writing about the movies, which is an increasingly common assignment in English/Language Arts classes!

The Great Gatsby (1949)

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The first big adaptation of The Great G atsby came in 1949, just as the book was becoming more popular (but before it had really settled in as classic American novel ). So this movie, made by Paramount Pictures, is not very high budget and mainly relies on the star power of Alan Ladd as Gatsby to sell the film.

Perhaps the studio was right to lean on Ladd, because it turns out that Ladd's performance is the main aspect of this adaptation worth watching . He brings an incredibly layered performance of Gatsby in a performance that's, unfortunately, much better than the movie around him.

This film isn't as accurate to the book's plot as later adaptations—it focuses more on Gatsby's criminal enterprises, makes Jordan more significant, and ends with Nick and Jordan married. It's also lower budget than the later productions and has more of a film noir feel .

Plus, the other actors, particularly Betty Field as Daisy, aren't nearly as good as the lead, making the overall cast weaker than later productions. (Though Shelley Winters is fantastic as Myrtle.)

This film is also harder to find since it's older and not readily available on streaming services like Netflix. Your best bet would be checking out a few clips on YouTube, tracking down a DVD copy at a local library, or purchasing it on Amazon.

Basically, this film is worth finding if you want an excellent visualization of Gatsby himself but aren't as worried about the surrounding production or other characters and/or you like old movies and film noir. But for most students, one of the later adaptations will likely be a better choice.

The Great Gatsby (1974)

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The 1974 version of The Great Gatsby (sometimes referred to as the "Robert Redford Great Gatsby ") was Hollywood's second attempt at adapting the novel, and by all accounts everyone involved was working a lot harder to do the book justice. It had a really large budget, brought in Francis Ford Coppola to adapt the screenplay, and cast big name actors like Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. The costumes and sets are stunning.

However, some critics noted the expensive scenery somewhat takes away from some of the authenticity of the book —for example, in the scene where Daisy and Gatsby reunite, the weather is sunny instead of rainy, presumably because the rain would have ruined the costumes.

Despite these blips, Coppola's screenplay is much more loyal to the book's plot than the 1949 version. However, the movie fails to channel the energy and passion of the novel, and so can fall flat or even become dull.

Redford received mixed reviews for his performance. He crafts two characters—the suave Jay Gatsby and the hardscrabble Jay Gatz—which some reviewers like and others find a bit heavy-handed. (It's much less subtle than Ladd's performance, in my opinion.)

Sam Waterston is great as Nick Carraway . He captures a lot of Nick's naïveté and optimism, but isn't given as much to do as more recent versions of the character. Mia Farrow's portrayal of Daisy has become our culture's image of this character, despite her blonde hair and waifish figure. (In the book, Daisy is described as having dark hair, and was meant to resemble Ginevra King and Zelda Sayre ).

All in all, this is a mostly faithful adaptation of the book with beautiful sets, costumes, and some good performances. Especially compared to the more raucous 2013 version, this is probably the closest movie we have to a page-to-screen adaptation of Gatsby . The downside is that it's somewhat low energy, and lacks a lot of the zip and wit of the novel .

This version is available on Netflix streaming, so if you have a Netflix account, it's really easy to watch.

The Great Gatsby (2000)

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This movie is decently accurate, but because of its shorter run time, there are some cuts to the plot. It also has a few odd additions, like Daisy coming up with the name "Gatsby" instead of Gatsby himself.

Paul Rudd as Carraway and Mira Sorvino as Daisy were mostly considered good casting choices, but the Gatsby here (Toby Stephens) wasn't great—rather lifeless and unenthusiastic. I also didn't love Jordan, especially compared to Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan in the 2013 film. Heather Goldenhersh's Myrtle is an interesting take, as well—she's more meek and pitiable than other Myrtles (especially Shelley Winters and Isla Fisher), which is a bit strange but I think it makes for a more sympathetic character.

This film also has much lower production values since it was made for TV, so it doesn't have the escapist feel of either the Redford or Luhrmann films. (The party scenes are especially sparse.)

I would consider watching this if you want a film mostly accurate to the book that also moves along more quickly, since it has a shorter run time. It's also a good choice if you want to see some great characterizations of Nick and Daisy.

Teachers, this might be a good choice if you want to show a version of the film in class but don't have two and a half hours to spend on the 1974 or 2013 versions.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

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This one is likely the Gatsby movie you are most familiar with. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, this Gatsby has the eye-popping visuals, dancing scenes, high energy and big production values his movies are known for. In other words, this 2013 adaptation has all of the energy and enthusiasm the previous two adaptations were lacking .

However, there are some pretty big plot diversions here. For example, the movie uses a completely different frame—Nick is a bitter, institutionalized alcoholic looking back at the summer he spent with Gatsby, rather than just a disenchanted former bond salesman like in the novel. Also, Tom Buchanan is much more overtly villainous, since we see him bluntly telling George that Gatsby was the killer and the man sleeping with Myrtle.

A lot of the imagery is also quite over the top. For example, the scene in Chapter 1 where Daisy and Jordan are introduced, lying in white dresses while white curtains blow around them, is faithfully but subtly done in the 1974 and 2000 films. But in the Luhrmann movie, the CGI curtains stretch all the way across the room, and we get 15 seconds of Daisy and Jordan giggling while Tobey Maguire's Nick looks on, bemused.

Still, despite the plot diversions and sometimes heavy-handed imagery, many praised Leo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan's turns as Gatsby and Daisy, respectively. Jordan, played by Elizabeth Debicki, is also fantastic—arguably the best on film so far . Instead of fading into the background of scenes, Debicki's Jordan is energetic and engaged, enlivening all of the scenes she's in.

The 2013 movie is good to watch if you want an extra high-powered version of the Jazz Age extravagance and are curious about a more artistic adaptation of the novel.

Comparing the Great Gatsby Movies to the Novel

One increasingly popular assignment on The Great Gatsby is to compare the book with one of the movie adaptations. This can be a fun assignment to work on, since you get to write about both the book and a movie version of Gatsby . But some students struggle with it, since it can be tricky to incorporate an analysis of both the book and a movie into your paper.

Here are some pro tips for constructing this kind of essay.

Have an overall argument or point you're trying to prove, and make it manageable! Don't try to compare the entire movie to the entire book. Instead, zoom in on a particular aspect, like comparing Daisy Buchanan in the book to Daisy in the movie, or look at just a few of the symbols. For example, if you're asked to write about how symbols are adapted in the movie, don't go through every symbol you can think of. Instead, you could focus on your paper on the green light or the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg , and really look at your chosen symbol in detail.

Make sure to use specific lines, scenes, or shots to back up your argument. In your English classes, you've probably learned about using evidence from the book as evidence for your essays. It turns out, you can do the same with movies! Even better, you have a wider variety of evidence to choose from.

You can talk about a specific shot of the film, and how it's composed (basically where the actors and objects are arranged in the shot). You can also talk about lines from the script, or the order of scenes. Just make sure to point to specific, concrete evidence! (Don't say: Carey Mulligan's Daisy is flighty. Do say: Carey Mulligan's performance in the flashback scene demonstrates more raw, intense emotion than apparent in the book, revealing Baz Luhrmann's tendency to overdraw emotion.)

Don't just make a list of plot differences between the book and the movie. Just listing the plot differences won't allow you to do any deep analysis of the director's vision for their film and how it's different from the novel.

Movie Essay Example

As a brief example, let's look at how one of Gatsby's most famous symbols, the green light at the end of the Buchanans' dock , is shown in two of the movies and what it shows about the directors' visions.

In the 1974 film, the green light is very simply rendered—it's quite literally a small green light at the end of Tom and Daisy's dock:

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Director Jack Clayton doesn't linger on it, and at the end of the film you just get a small glimpse of it before the final fade to black. Its significance, I would argue, is even more underplayed than in the novel. The treatment of the green light echoes how Clayton goes for a subtle, even elegant, treatment of the novel, focusing on the interactions between the characters rather than the symbolism.

But in the 2013 film, the green light shows up often, and Luhrmann uses CGI and sound effects to underscore its significance (check out how it's used in the last scene ). Luhrmann's overwrought rendering of the green light speaks to how he strongly stresses the novel's most famous visuals , in an effort to bring the image of the novel to light. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of some of the character relationships and fidelity to the book's plot.

This is just the beginning of what could be a longer analysis of the symbols in the movies, but you can see how even zooming in on just one symbol can give you quite a bit to talk about.

Other Notable Films

If you're really getting into all things F. Scott Fitzgerald, you might also consider watching these three films for fun:

  • G , which came out in 2002 and is a loose adaptation of Gatsby . In the film, Gatsby is Summer G, a hip-hop mogul trying to win back the love of his life, Sky. The film opened to generally poor reviews, but you can't deny it's a really creative take on Gatsby, and it has attracted a small but loyal following online.
  • Midnight in Paris briefly shows Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald during their time in Paris, as portrayed by Tom Hiddleston and Allison Pill. This is a fun, if fictional, glimpse into F. Scott's life as he was writing Gatsby .
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , a recent film starring Brad Pitt, is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.

What's Next?

Looking to bring Gatsby into your life via outfits, candles, or other accoutrements? Check out our list of 15 must-have Great Gatsby accessories for ideas .

Read through our biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald to learn more about where and how The Great Gatsby was written.

Dive into the novel's beginning with our guides to Gatsby 's title , its opening pages and epigraph , and the first chapter . Or, start with a summary of The Great Gatsby , along with links to all our great articles analyzing this novel!

Need a hand with analyzing other works of literature? Check out our analyses of The Crucible , The Cask of Amontillado , and " Do not go gentle into that good night ."

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Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Great Gatsby Movie Review Essay

In the current paper we will review a movie “The Great Gatsby”, and we will analyze the movie in terms of its genre and the elements of film. As a part of my role as a movie critic I will create my own scale to rate the movie. I will use a scale of 1 through 5 stars, which is typical of many movie critic writers.

I can say that the film is typical for its drama genre. I feel that the editing was appropriate and gave reflection of the important moments the way people should see it. The sound use was powerful and effective, which helped to highlight the most important moments in the film. The feelings when I watched the film were pleasure and sadness. The film’s cinematography supported the mood and tone of the movie, by including music in it, they way characters talked and what they did. The social context in which the film was made, was present in the film by showing the all people were connected and knew someone in common. The meaning of the film is about the great love, sacrifice, and decency. The film is also about the love of Gatsby for stupid, and greedy Daisy, tinsel at his parties, his crazy wealth, his crony “old man” – and with all of this, he has deep intelligence, cleaner, brighter and more decent than the real aristocrats have, who eventually destroy this man with their marginal hands.

Considering the personal influences that this film had on me, I can name the money issue and the relationships. This film highlights the idea that people need someone to love, and not all the money in the world to be happy. This film also shows that time passes and sometimes we have to choose relationships or career. The drama shows us how people can be unhappy being rich as the same time and looking for love which they one day left in the past. The film was extremely enjoyable and interesting to watch this reflection on the modern society. I would definitely recommend the movie and I would rate it by giving it 5 stars.

“The Great Gatsby” is a film adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It has been filmed in 3D, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. Baz Luhrmann conceived this film during the global financial crisis, while staying in Siberia. In one interview, he said: “If you put people in front of a mirror that tell them – you are drunk on the money – they will not want to look into it. But if you project a reflection on a particular era, such a story would be in a great demand.” One of the most famous writers of the United States of XX century, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced to the world the beginning of the new century – “Jazz Age”, one of the first to speak on behalf of the “lost generation” (Scott, 2013). He wrote of the “American dream”, personifying it, but the reality turned into tragedy, and early death cut short the life minion of fortune. The hero of the novel “The Great Gatsby” made ​​a fortune, has made power, but neither money nor power made ​​him happy.

In the spring of 1922, in the era of decaying morals, the brilliant jazz and the “kings of smuggled alcohol,” Nick Carraway comes from the Midwest to New York. In pursuit of his own American dream, he settles in next door to a mysterious, well – known for its partying millionaire Jay Gatsby, and on the opposite shore of the bay lives his cousin Daisy and her husband, a rake and an aristocrat, Tom Buchanan (Denby, 2013). So Nick is drawn into the exciting world of the rich – their illusions, love and lies. He becomes a witness to what is happening in this world and writes a story of impossible love, eternal dreams and the human tragedy that is a reflection of modern times and mores.

The film is about the great love of a man (Gatsby) to a woman (his beloved Daisy). He dedicated his life to her, she was his dream, his guiding star, the most desirable, unique and unrepeatable. They are from different worlds – she is a spoiled rich girl, but he is the son of poor farmers. He wanted to be rich enough to give the whole world to his Daisy, giving her everything she wants. And for that, he went to war, after that he received the opportunity to study at Harvard, make useful contacts, enter the circle of influential people, and after that he contacted the gangsters involved in clandestine sale of alcohol (it brought a lot of money, because in America at the time was the dry law) … And all this was for the sake of dreams ever marry Daisy, reaching a high position, and having a considerable fortune.

As he says at the end of the film, that all these years without even being married to Daisy, he felt married, and therefore responsible for their future together. That is why he risked so much in his work. He did not need anyone except her. Also, there is a storyline about the community, about the so-called elite of society, riot, rottenness, the hypocrisy of so-called “high society.” Scott Fitzgerald wrote a lot about contemporary American society (this is the beginning of the 20th century), his morals, his true face, and his hypocrisy.

The film “The Great Gatsby” is just perfect. Throughout the excesses of emotion and colors it has its own kind of inexplicable harmony. Even the apparently modern soundtracks so neatly stacked on one long bygone world that seem natural. The film is a wonderful adaptation of the novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald’s classic novel got into the hands of Baz Luhrmann, the famous magician, entertainer, that is why you see on the screen exactly what you expected – literature is retreating under the pressure of design (“The Great Gatsby” Critic Reviews, 2013). Crystal blinds, champagne is bubbling and expensive cars strive to crash into the viewer. At the same time, the director manages carefully with the original text, sometimes reproducing it verbatim, and the image of Gatsby suits Leonardo DiCaprio.

“If you measure the personality of its ability to show itself, the Gatsby was something truly magnificent, had some heightened sensitivity to all the promises of life … It was a rare gift of hope, a romantic ardor, which I have never seen in other people.”

The film describes a unique situation where a man not just knows what he wants, but he knows that will make him happy. He showed that this happens – bootlegging not drunk, the goal is visible, jazz sounds. And the man still, just does not think that the business is outside of the law, that his goal is illusory, and jazz it not as stylish as in the twenty-first century. The man knows what it takes to be happy, and it happens so rarely that he is trying so hard. And this divine tragedy by the author explained: “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”.

David Denby (2013). “All that Jazz”. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/05/13/130513crci_cinema_denby

Scott A. O. (2013). “Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle”. NY Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/movies/the-great-gatsby-interpreted-by-baz-luhrmann.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“The Great Gatsby” Critic Reviews (2013). The Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/criticreviews

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Is color as big of a deal as people make it out to be? The color shows meaning in a certain way that nothing else can. So, would you feel the same way about a sunset or an array of blooming flowers in a field if you could not ...

Next, Fitzgerald depicts a post-war world which carries very subjective values and customs towards women. In Fitzgerald's novel, women remain prisoners of patriarchy. They are either commodities to be possessed and discarded by ...

In the novel The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is evident that happiness is portrayed as a result of material gain which comes to an end of spiritual poverty. The term material gain is referred to an individual ...

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — The Great Gatsby

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Essays on The Great Gatsby

The great gatsby essay topic examples.

Whether you want to analyze the American Dream, compare and contrast characters, vividly describe settings and characters, persuade readers with your viewpoints, or share personal experiences related to the story, these essay ideas provide a diverse perspective on the themes and complexities within the book.

Argumentative Essays

Argumentative essays require you to analyze and present arguments related to the novel. Here are some topic examples:

  • 1. Argue whether the American Dream is achievable or illusory, as depicted in The Great Gatsby .
  • 2. Analyze the moral ambiguity of Jay Gatsby and the consequences of his relentless pursuit of the American Dream.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Essay: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a tale of ambition, decadence, and the elusive American Dream. This essay delves into the complex theme of the American Dream, exploring whether it remains attainable or has transformed into a tantalizing illusion, luring individuals like Jay Gatsby into its enigmatic embrace.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Essay: In conclusion, the analysis of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby invites us to reevaluate our perceptions of success and fulfillment. As we contemplate the fate of Jay Gatsby and the characters entangled in his world, we are challenged to define our own version of the American Dream and the sacrifices it may entail.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast essays enable you to examine similarities and differences within the novel or between it and other literary works. Consider these topics:

  • 1. Compare and contrast the characters of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, exploring their contrasting worldviews and motivations.
  • 2. Analyze the similarities and differences between the portrayal of the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises .

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Essay: The characters and settings in The Great Gatsby and other literary works offer a rich tapestry for comparison and contrast. This essay embarks on a journey to compare and contrast the enigmatic Jay Gatsby and the brash Tom Buchanan, delving into their contrasting values, aspirations, and roles within the novel.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan illuminate the divergent paths individuals can take in pursuit of their desires. As we consider the consequences of their choices, we are prompted to reflect on the complexities of ambition and morality.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive essays allow you to vividly depict settings, characters, or events within the novel. Here are some topic ideas:

  • 1. Describe the opulent parties at Gatsby's mansion, emphasizing the decadence and extravagance of the Jazz Age.
  • 2. Paint a detailed portrait of Daisy Buchanan, focusing on her beauty, charm, and the allure she holds for Gatsby.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Essay: The Great Gatsby immerses readers in the lavish world of the Roaring Twenties. This essay embarks on a descriptive exploration of the extravagant parties at Gatsby's mansion, capturing the opulence and hedonism of the era, as well as the illusions they create.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive portrayal of Gatsby's parties serves as a vivid snapshot of the Jazz Age's excesses and the fleeting nature of indulgence. Through this exploration, we are reminded of the allure and transience of the materialistic pursuits that captivated the characters of the novel.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive essays involve arguing a point of view related to the novel. Consider these persuasive topics:

  • 1. Persuade your readers that Nick Carraway is the moral compass of the story, serving as the voice of reason and morality.
  • 2. Argue for or against the idea that Gatsby's love for Daisy is genuine and selfless, despite his questionable methods.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Essay: The Great Gatsby presents a tapestry of characters with complex moral dilemmas. This persuasive essay asserts that Nick Carraway emerges as the moral compass of the story, guiding readers through the labyrinth of decadence and disillusionment in the Jazz Age.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument regarding Nick Carraway's role as the moral compass underscores the importance of ethical navigation in a world characterized by excess and moral ambiguity. As we reflect on his influence, we are compelled to consider the enduring value of integrity and virtue.

Narrative Essays

Narrative essays offer you the opportunity to tell a story or share personal experiences related to the themes of the novel. Explore these narrative essay topics:

  • 1. Narrate a personal experience where you encountered the allure of materialism and extravagance, similar to the characters in The Great Gatsby .
  • 2. Imagine yourself as a character in the Jazz Age and recount your interactions with Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Essay: The themes of The Great Gatsby resonate with the allure of a bygone era. This narrative essay delves into a personal encounter with the seductive pull of materialism and extravagance, drawing parallels to the characters' experiences in the novel.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Essay: In conclusion, the narrative of my personal encounter with the allure of materialism reminds us of the timeless nature of the themes in The Great Gatsby . As we navigate our own desires and ambitions, we are encouraged to contemplate the balance between aspiration and morality.

The Superficial Love of Gatsby: His Obsession with Daisy's Wealth

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Character Portrayals and Society in The Great Gatsby

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"The Great Gatsby": Theme and Symbols

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The Portrayal of Female Characters in F.s. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

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April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Novel; Fiction, Tragedy

Jay Gatsby , Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, Jordan Baker, Meyer Wolfsheim, George B. Wilson, Trimalchio, Mr. Gatz

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "The Great Gatsby" with multiple motivations in mind. Firstly, he sought to critique the materialistic excesses and moral decay of the Roaring Twenties, a period of post-World War I prosperity. Fitzgerald aimed to expose the disillusionment and hollowness behind the glittering facade of the American Dream. Additionally, he drew inspiration from his own experiences and observations of the wealthy elite and their decadent lifestyles. Through the character of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald explored themes of unrequited love, longing, and the pursuit of an unattainable ideal. Ultimately, Fitzgerald's intent was to capture the essence of an era and offer a profound commentary on the human condition.

The story revolves around Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a married woman with whom he had a romantic past. Narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest, the novel delves into the opulent and extravagant lives of the wealthy elite in Long Island. As Gatsby throws lavish parties in the hope of rekindling his relationship with Daisy, the narrative explores themes of love, wealth, illusion, and the disillusionment that comes with the pursuit of the American Dream.

The American Dream , decadence, idealism, resistance to changes, social excess, caution.

The influence of "The Great Gatsby" extends far beyond its initial publication in 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel has become a literary classic, revered for its exploration of themes such as wealth, love, and the elusive American Dream. It remains relevant due to its timeless portrayal of human desires, societal decadence, and the consequences of relentless pursuit. The book's vivid characters and atmospheric prose have inspired countless writers and artists, shaping the landscape of American literature. With its commentary on the dark underbelly of the Jazz Age, "The Great Gatsby" continues to captivate readers, serving as a cautionary tale and a poignant reflection of the human condition.

1. During F. Scott Fitzgerald's lifetime, approximately 25,000 copies of the book were sold. However, since then, it has gained immense popularity, selling over 25 million copies and establishing itself as one of the most renowned American novels. 2. The Great Gatsby did not have its original title as the author considered various options, ranging from "Under the Red, White and Blue" to "The High-Bouncing Lover." These alternative titles were potentially revealing too much about the content prematurely. 3. In 1926, just a year after its publication, the book was adapted into a film, demonstrating its quick transition from page to screen. 4. Fitzgerald's cause of death is believed to have been tuberculosis rather than a heart attack. Sadly, he passed away at the age of 44. 5. The price of this famous novel at the time of its publication in 1925 was $2, representing its value in that era. 6. The Great Gatsby did not immediately receive critical acclaim upon release. However, it has since garnered recognition and praise, becoming a significant literary work.

"The Great Gatsby" has made a significant impact on various forms of media, captivating audiences across generations. The novel has been adapted into several films, with notable versions including the 1974 adaptation starring Robert Redford and the 2013 adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. These cinematic interpretations have brought the story to life visually, further immersing audiences in the opulent world of Jay Gatsby. Additionally, the novel has been referenced and alluded to in countless songs, television shows, and even video games, solidifying its cultural significance. Its themes of love, wealth, and the pursuit of the American Dream continue to resonate and inspire creative works in popular culture.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’” “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” “I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Studying "The Great Gatsby" holds great importance due to its enduring relevance and literary significance. The novel offers profound insights into themes such as wealth, love, social class, and the corruption of the American Dream. Its exploration of the Jazz Age exposes the allure and emptiness of a materialistic society, making it a compelling study of human desires and societal decay. F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterful prose and symbolic imagery provide rich material for analyzing character development, narrative techniques, and social commentary. Moreover, delving into the novel's historical context allows for a deeper understanding of the cultural and societal shifts of the 1920s.

The inclusion of "The Great Gatsby" as an essay topic for college students stems from its exploration of themes like the American Dream, the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth, and the destructive allure of corruption. The character of Gatsby embodies the American spirit and can be paralleled to contemporary individuals fixated on materialism and fame as measures of romantic success. Furthermore, this literary masterpiece holds a significant place in American literature, as F. Scott Fitzgerald skillfully weaves socio-cultural elements into each sentence, providing a timeless portrayal of American life that resonates across generations. The choice to analyze and write about "The Great Gatsby" allows students to delve into these thought-provoking themes and examine their relevance to society.

1. Stallman, R. W. (1955). Conrad and The Great Gatsby. Twentieth Century Literature, 1(1), 5–12. (https://doi.org/10.2307/441023) 2. John Jerrim, Lindsey Macmillan, (2015). Income Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Great Gatsby Curve: Is Education the Key?, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 2. (https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/94/2/505/2583794) 3. Robert C. Hauhart (2013) Religious Language and Symbolism in The Great Gatsby’s Valley of Ashes, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 26:3 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2013.798233) 4. Burnam, T. (1952). The Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A Re-Examination of “The Great Gatsby.” College English, 14(1), 7–12. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/371821) 5. Tom Phillips (2018) Passing for White in THE GREAT GATSBY: A Spectroscopic Analysis of Jordan Baker, The Explicator, 76:3. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00144940.2018.1489769?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab) 6. Matterson, S. (1990). The Great Gatsby and Social Class. In: The Great Gatsby. The Critics Debate. Palgrave, London. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-20768-8_9) 7. Licence, A. (2008). Jay Gatsby: martyr of a materialistic society: Amy Licence considers religious elements in The Great Gatsby. The English Review, 18(3), 24+. (https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA173676222&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=09558950&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E5a84816e) 8. Khodamoradpour, Marjan and Anushiravani, Alireza, (2017) Playing the Old Tunes: A Fiskean Analysis of Baz Luhrmann's 2013 Cinematic Adaptation of the Great Gatsby. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Volume 71. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3020752) 9. Anderson, H. (1968). THE RICH BUNCH IN" THE GREAT GATSBY". Southern Quarterly, 6(2), 163. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/6a9e704a476d873aada2d2529821b95a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2029886)

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the great gatsby movie review 2013 essay

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  4. The Great Gatsby (2013) Film Review [Spoiler Free]

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  1. The Great Gatsby movie review (2013)

    Reviews The Great Gatsby Matt Zoller Seitz May 08, 2013 Tweet Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" isn't a disaster. Every frame is sincere. Its miscalculations come from a wish to avoid embalming a classic novel in "respectfulness" — a worthy goal, in theory.

  2. Film Review: 'The Great Gatsby'

    Film Review: 'The Great Gatsby' Reviewed at Warner Bros. screening room, New York, April 30, 2013. (In Cannes Film Festival — opener, noncompeting.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 141 MIN.

  3. The Great Gatsby

    The film is in fact narrated in flashback, with Maguire's Nick attempting therapy for his depression and alcoholism, an interesting 21st century slant on all the frenzied drinking going on. He ...

  4. Great Gatsby Movie Review Essay

    The text did not translate well into film; some facts are distorted, the depiction of the characters are different, the general ambience of certain settings do not match, and the movie is weighted towards the beginning of the book, with half of the movie based closely on the first two chapters of the book. 1469 Words 6 Pages

  5. The Great Gatsby Film Review Essay

    "The Great Gatsby" (2013) Film Review The 2013 movie adaptation of 'The Great Gatsby" certainly steps out of the cozy boundaries of the novella of less than two hundred pages by F. Scott Fitzegerald with its gaudy attitude and fast-paced scenes that at the same time is quite picturesque and full of details reproduced to match the prose that has ...

  6. 'The Great Gatsby,' Interpreted by Baz Luhrmann

    PG-13 2h 23m By A.O. Scott May 9, 2013 The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann's big and noisy new version of "The Great Gatsby" — and despite what you may have heard, it is an eminently enjoyable...

  7. The Great Gatsby: Film Review

    Movies Movie Reviews The Great Gatsby: Film Review Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan star in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. By Todd McCarthy...

  8. The Great Gatsby (2013) Review

    The Great Gatsby (2013) Director: Baz Luhrmann. Cast: Leonardo di Caprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Emily Foreman, Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isla Fisher. Plot : In the Roaring Twenties, the golden life of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and the hope of a promising future as a writer attract the young and naive Nick Carraway ...

  9. The Great Gatsby

    The Great Gatsby - review. ... Sat 18 May 2013 19.07 EDT. ... than Mia Farrow in Jack Clayton's otherwise better-judged 1974 Gatsby. But if Clayton's film was a little too restrained and ...

  10. The Great Gatsby (2013) Film Review [Spoiler Free]

    The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, was held in much anticipation among the likes of literature junkies, DiCaprio fanatics, and box office skeptics.With a film that proceeds a handful of remakes decades apart, this 2013 version had critics doubting Luhrmann's rendition measurable to the 1974 Gatsby movie starring Robert ...

  11. The Great Gatsby

    Top Critics All Audience Verified Audience Bianca Garner The Movie Buff The Great Gatsby lacks the charm and the nostalgia of musicals such as High Society, An American in Paris, and Singin'...

  12. 'The Great Gatsby' Movie Review (2013)

    Movies 'The Great Gatsby' (2013) Movie Review May 9, 2013 By Brad Brevet In 1974, Jack Clayton brought F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" to the big screen and the film...

  13. The Great Gatsby (2013)

    An over-stylized and under-thought adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's seminal novel, Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby features a number of excellent performances from a gorgeous cast, all undone by Luhrmann's characteristically bloated production.Another of the Moulin Rouge director's post-modern attempts to infuse the old with the new, the film contains none of the nuances of ...

  14. Review: The Great Gatsby (Film)

    Movie directed by BAZ LUHRMANNReviewed by LISA ALEXANDER. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 The Great Gatsby is a simple story at heart: poor boy meets rich girl and, by dint of superhuman perseverance, transcends his origins only to find out it doesn't matter because her kind will never accept him anyway. This slender novel has become shorthand ...

  15. The Great Gatsby' Movie Review Essay

    The Great Gatsby is seen as a notable bit of social discourse, supplying a clear seem into American lifestyles in the 1920s. Luhrmann deliberately sets up this movie into unmistakable gatherings be that as it may, at last, each gathering has its troubles to fight with, leaving a severe indication of what a hazardous area the world clearly is.

  16. The Great Gatsby

    Tenet Sep 03 View All The Great Gatsby PG-13 2013, Drama, 2h 22m 48% Tomatometer 305 Reviews 67% Audience Score 100,000+ Ratings What to know Critics Consensus

  17. "The Great Gatsby": Try Again, Old Sport

    In other words, Fitzgerald had been in love with Ginevra King, who instead married a wealthy young man.Soon thereafter, Fitzgerald, a successful writer, married Zelda Sayre. Nick Carraway may have ...

  18. Every Great Gatsby Movie, Compared: 2013, 1974, 1949

    2013 Version—142 minutes Especially with the incredibly busy schedules many students have these days, it could be hard to find the time to devote two and a half hours to watching a Gatsby movie, on top of the time it takes to read the book.

  19. The Great Gatsby Movie Review and Plot

    If you are a fan of Historical contents, then this film might be good for you. The film The Great Gatsby is a romantic drama released in the year 2013, it is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel. It was co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, the film starred Leonardo DiCaprio, whose famous in his movie, Titanic.

  20. The Great Gatsby Movie Review Essay

    George Wilson gave up on life. "Marxism believes that economic conflict produces class (rich, middle and poor) and inherently class produces conflict" (Daniel Chandler, 2014). Conflicts which are triggered by emotions, and have negative serious consequences to the people involved and even to third-parties. Sadly, the poor class gets hurt the most.

  21. The Great Gatsby Film Analysis Essay

    It has been filmed in 3D, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. Baz Luhrmann conceived this film during the global financial crisis, while staying in Siberia. In one interview, he said: "If you put people in front of a mirror that tell them - you are drunk on the money - they will not want to look into it.

  22. Film Review: The Great Gatsby

    Words: 798 (2 pages) Download Please note! This essay has been submitted by a student. The history of this film was 1920s social life, it seems as though that the film stayed pretty accurate to all the wonders of 1920s social life, from business to cars, and the life of music and specifically jazz.

  23. The Great Gatsby Essay Examples

    General Overview 155 essay samples found 1 The Superficial Love of Gatsby: His Obsession with Daisy's Wealth 3 pages / 1237 words In The Great Gatsby, one of the most prominent features of the book is the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy.