You pretty much know what you’re in for in this, the third screen
adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic
1925 novel
The Great Gatsby when
the film begins with a series of loving, beautifully lit, perfectly framed,
Architectural
Digest-worthy shots of property and objects. Instead of a haunting rumination on
romantic obsession as a means of recapturing the past, poetically framed by a bitter
indictment of materialism, the American Dream, and the
emotional recklessness of the rich; this is
The
Great Gatsby as told from the perspective of nostalgia fetish.
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| The Great Gatsby suffers a bit from a confused point of view. When the camera lens is trained on Gatsby's beautiful objects, I suspect we're supposed to respond to the hollow allure of materialism. Unfortunately, the images are so arrestingly beautiful that they invite audiences to ooh and ahh over their luster. In essence, to view the items from the acquisitive, money-enamored perspective of Daisy. A bit of a problem, given that she is one of the more superficial and morally corrupt characters in the film. |
In this Jack Clayton directed (
The Innocents,
Room at the
Top) adaptation of an
overly-reverential screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the unrequited love affair between
Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan takes a back seat to the love affair the camera
has with all the 1920s Art Deco knickknacks, gimcracks, and gewgaws on display
throughout. This
The Great Gatsby is
a fashionista’s orgy of breathtaking period costuming, a production designer’s wet dream of glittering Jazz Age opulence, and an antiquities museum curator’s
idea of a motion picture. Lovely to look at, yet emotionally arid, antiseptic,
and hermetically sealed.
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| Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby |
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| Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan |
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| Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan |
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| Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway |
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| Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson |
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| Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker |
Miscast, misguided, and overproduced (the latter an odd thing
to say about a movie that revels in the excesses of the wealthy). That this
film ranks at all amongst my picks of memorable movies to write about for this
blog is largely due to The Great Gatsby
being one of my top, all-time favorite novels, and this version being a
particularly faithful big-screen adaptation. Painstakingly so, in fact. Indeed, the paradox of this nearly $7 million mounting of The Great Gatsby is how it is able to faithfully replicate so many intricate details of the novel (including sizable
chunks of dialog and virtually the entirety of the book's events and
characters) while still managing somehow to leave out both the book's passion and its pathos. It’s
like one of those lifelike celebrity waxworks at Madame Tussauds: identical in every superficial detail, but falling
short of being a true representation of life because it lacks a soul.
How this came to be can perhaps be traced to the film’s troubled
genesis, recounted in fascinating detail in Bruce Bahrenburg’s book,
Filming The Great Gatsby (my own yellowed
and tattered copy, purchased in the heat of 1974’s studio-generated “Gatsby
Fever”). Originally conceived and developed as a wedding present vehicle for Ali MacGraw by
then-husband Robert Evans,
The Great
Gatsby was derailed when MacGraw threw a gold-plated, 14-carat monkey wrench into the works by falling in love with her
The Getaway co-star, Steve McQueen. While the hunt
went out for a new Daisy (in which several credible applicants like Faye
Dunaway and Candice Bergen were passed over for, in my opinion, the absolutely incredible choice of Mia Farrow), an ailing Truman Capote was fired as screenwriter and later sued the studio. Meanwhile, the beautiful but inexpressive Lois Chiles was entrusted with the showy role of
Jordan Baker simply because she was the girlfriend of the cuckolded Robert Evans, and studio head Charles Bluhdorn figured the poor guy needed to catch a break.
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Daisy & Gatsby
Mia Farrow (absolute perfection in Rosemary's Baby) is an actress I greatly admire, but for me, she was totally out of her depth as Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the ability of say, Julie Christie, who can somehow play shallow and self-absorbed as interesting and sympathetic, Farrow's Daisy is mostly annoyingly fey and shrill. To be fair, F.Scott Fitzgerald's daughter, Frances, told People magazine at the time, "Mia Farrow looks like the Daisy my father had in mind." However, this was said during the filming. I've no idea what she thought after seeing the finished product. |
Most movies have tortuous paths to completion, but
The Great Gatsby is one of those films that gives the appearance of an inordinate amount of time and energy being spent on engineering a marketable property, not making a film. We still have the basic story of the millionaire with the shady past who attempts to reignite an old love affair with the socialite who threw him over years ago when he was poor, but that's almost all we have. Very little of what can be deemed effective is done with the novel's themes involving class, idealized romance, and morality.
One rarely gets the sense that anyone involved in the making of
The Great Gatsby had even read the novel, much less understood any
of what Fitzgerald was trying to say
about the corrupting allure of the shiny side of the American Dream. Had more than a few seconds of thought been afforded these concerns, surely someone would have noted the contradiction inherent in making an ostentatious, large-scale behemoth about the pernicious vulgarity
of the rich. I have a hunch that Paramount, in having made a fortune with Erich
Segal’s
Love Story, merely saw Fitzgerald's book as a "great romance." I'm sure it was their hope to combine
the crowd-pleasing romanticism of
Love
Story (1970) with the moneymaking, sentimentalized nostalgia of
The Way We Were (1973), and never gave a
thought to much else.
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Hype Gripe
The amount of publicity surrounding the release of The Great Gatsby was near-suffocating and ultimately off-putting to the public. In 1974 Warner Bros had Mame waiting in the wings, while Paramount had Gatsby as well as Chinatown. The entire country was swept up in a nostalgia craze that even the decade's eventual disco fever couldn't quell. |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT
THIS FILM
For all my complaining about what a prefab piece of
Hollywood machinery
The Great Gatsby
turned out to be, I nevertheless get quite a kick out of the film. This in spite of my not finding the film to be particularly good, yet feeling a certain attachment to it due to a few sentimental, Gatsby-esque reasons of my own. The pleasure I derive from watching
The Great Gatsby these days is chiefly nostalgic in nature, and directly related to the memories I have
of my sixteen-year-old self in 1974. Back then I was caught up in all things movie-related and
willfully swept up in the
Gatsby hype. I bought all the magazines containing Gatsby articles, purchased the soundtrack
album, and dragged my family to see it several times. I did everything short of begging my mother to purchase
and serve our meals on the limited-edition
The Great
Gatsby Corelle® dinnerware they sold at the local department store.
At that time, I hadn't yet read Fitzgerald’s novel, so I didn't have any expectations waiting to be dashed. Nevertheless, in spite of my enthusiasm (or perhaps, because of it) when the film finally opened, I was a bit underwhelmed. It was nothing like the moving romance I was
expecting, but it was a great deal like a film adaptation of a campy,
self-serious Harold Robbins novel. Then, as now, I find it a gorgeous film to
look at, and with each passing year, I grow ever fonder of the old-fashioned movie
magic of large crowds of extras, big sets, period detail, all accomplished with
no CGI. But it's still a film whose every scene is haunted by the twin ghosts of what-could-have-been and unrealized potential.
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A Fine Romance
If Gatsby and Daisy failed to sizzle for some audiences, their lack of heat is nothing compared to the non-romance of butch professional golfer Jordan Baker and Tony Perkins-esque narrator Nick Carraway. According to IMDB trivia, original screenwriter Truman Capote wrote Nick as a homosexual and Jordan as a lesbian. Sounds about right to me. |
My DVD of the film is a treasured guilty pleasure, but I can't help wishing it were otherwise. A consolation of sorts is that the joys I currently find in this
surprisingly joyless movie (Gatsby’s parties look well-populated and busy, but not the least bit
fun) are of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. I honestly could watch this film every day, yet I wouldn't recommend it to a soul. It's a very watchable, amiable kind of failure. One which yields new campy treasures and glaring misjudgments with each viewing.
A couple of examples:
Daisy’s hair. In her memoirs, Mia Farrow felt her
performance was “undermined” by the unflattering wig she was forced to wear,
claiming that for the duration, “(It) felt and looked like cotton candy.” Can’t
disagree with her there.
The clothes fetish. I know everyone in this movie is
supposed to be rich and can afford fancy garb, but this is one of those movies
where all the clothes have that distracting “never been worn” look. This also applies
to the never-lived-in sets and all those pristine automobiles on display. These
cars are so drooled over by the camera that when Myrtle meets her end at the fender
of Gatsby’s gorgeous yellow Rolls Royce, I'm tempted to think audiences were left in a moral quandary...were they upset by her grisly death, or because she left such a big, ugly dent in that perfectly lovely automobile?
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| Author Tom Wolfe: "I'll never forgive the 1974 version of 'The Great Gatsby,' which was the Fitzgerald novel as reinterpreted by the garment industry. Throughout the picture, Robert Redford wore white suits. They fitted so badly that every time he turned a corner there was an eighty-microsecond lag before they joined him." |
PERFORMANCES
According to Roman Polanski, his dream casting of the role
of Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby
would have been Robert Redford. Upon seeing the lack of chemistry displayed between
Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in The
Great Gatsby, I'm inclined to think he dodged a bullet there. Certainly the Clark
Gable of the ’70s, Robert Redford is a strikingly handsome man (I could write a sonnet
about the way the sun hits the blond fur on his upper thighs in his swimsuit scene); but he
is woefully stiff and colorless as Gatsby. It’s unimaginable that anyone this bland could harbor an obsessed fixation on anything other than perhaps Miracle Whip.
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| Most of the acting in The Great Gatsby falls into one of two categories: stiff or fussy. As garage owner George Wilson, actor Scott Wilson (so good in In Cold Blood) somehow manages to combine both as he's allowed to go through the entire film with the exact same watery-eyed, self-pitying expression you see here. The exasperation expressed by wife Myrtle (Karen Black) is pretty much on par with my own. |
By way of contrast, we have my personal 70s fave, Karen Black, giving
what can most charitably be described as a ridiculous performance as 20s
hotbox, Myrtle Wilson. Karen Black won a Golden Globe for it, so perhaps it’s
just a matter of taste, but I don’t believe her Myrtle for a minute…which is
not the same thing as saying that I don’t love her performance. Acting her ass off in an almost alarmingly mannered fashion, Black is terrible
in that Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara way. And as such, she’s close to being the
only life the film has. I'm not sure whose idea it was to make Myrtle so hapless (over the course of the film, Black falls down a flight of stairs, shoves her hand through a plate window, and suffers a rap across the mouth), but hers is a physical, black comedy performance (pun intended) very faithful to the idiosyncratic skills of the actress. Tone and tempo of the rest of the film be damned.
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| Actress Brooke Adams, (l.) who would star in 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and actor Edward Herrmann (r.) who played FDR in the 1982 musical, Annie show up in bit parts as party guests in The Great Gatsby. |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
There’s not a lot that Mia Farrow does right in The Great Gatsby, but there is one scene
where she so completely nails it that it almost makes her being so poorly cast
worthwhile. It’s the scene that takes place in the Buchanan household when everyone is sitting around the dinner table complaining about the heat (taking
place over the course of one summer, everybody sweats a lot in this movie…from the neck up, anyway. No one’s clothes are ever damp). In this scene, Daisy forgets herself and speaks to Gatsby as though the others aren't there. “Ah, you look so cool. You always look so cool,” she
says dreamily. Catching herself, she blushes and starts to rattle off a nonsense explanation
that hilariously trails off to nowhere. Farrow seriously knocks that little bit
of business out of the park. It’s the single most authentically character-based
acting she does in the film, and she’s great. In that one minute, I can see what kind
of woman Daisy was perhaps supposed to be all along.
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| Very Pretty People Capable of Very Ugly Things |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Trusting a sensitive book like The
Great Gatsby to an industry comprised of individuals who wouldn't recognize a moral imperative if it tapped them on the shoulder and asked if it could park
their Hummers for them, is a little like asking Donald Trump to act like a
human being for five minutes: the desire may be there, but the tools to pull
it off aren't.
This version of The
Great Gatsby is almost valueless as drama, but it's the perfect kind of screen
adaptation of a literary classic for showing in high school English Classes.
For while it is a faithful visual representation of the body of the text, at no
time does the film tip its hand toward revealing what the novel’s underlying
themes are, leaving students free to discuss amongst themselves.
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Toned, tanned, & terrific, beefcake Redford provides a glimpse of what is
so great about this particular Gatsby. |
Because in my heart I consider The Great Gatsby to be a book of ideas and moral concepts poetically
dramatized, I have my doubts as to whether it’s the kind of book that will ever lend
itself to a satisfying screen adaptation. I must say I’m intrigued by the little I've seen of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming adaptation (although I'm not sure if I'm up for another one of Tobey Maguire's stare-a-thon roles). Its considerable
visual dazzle once again raises the issue of whether or not it is possible for a film to simultaneously condemn and chronicle extreme wealth. If
not, I guess we'll be left with another example of the past repeating itself...in 3-D, no less.
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| Gatsby reaches out toward the light at the end of Daisy's dock. |
Nick: “You can’t repeat the
past.”
Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the
past? Of course you can.”
Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2013
Like many people my age (never mind), I have a tendency to
look back on specific aspects of the past through decidedly rose-colored
glasses. Motion pictures in particular are vulnerable to this alchemy, as I fell
in love with movies during the late-60s and 70s: a time of groundbreaking
innovation in film.
