Criticisms
of two recent adaptations of great works of literature show how some critics
have an idealized view of these books, or of characters within the books, and
complain when the film doesn’t translate these versions accurately to the
screen. Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby are both works of acute
social critique, each clothed in a love story.
I
have written about Anna Karenina elsewhere (see A Tract for Our Times), so here I will stay with
Baz Luhrmann’s recent film The Great Gatsby.
Novels
create characters, both on the page and in our minds. Some of these fictional characters even find
their way into our hearts, either as heroes and heroines, or as romantic
figures.
Sometimes we can become rather fond of them. When these ‘written’ figures appear on screen we may
be able to adapt the physical image we had of them to fit the films cast, but
if they are then portrayed on screen as essentially shallow we may feel
cheated. Daisy Buchanan and Jay
Gatsby, for instance, may be bathed in a romantic light in our hearts and
minds, but a film maker,
paying close attention to the text from which they sprang, may see, and portray
them in a less flattering light.
We may be tempted to dismiss this interpretation rather than go back to
the novel and question it. And if
the book has already been filmed with a more sympathetic eye for its main
characters that our feelings of alienation from the new film may be reinforced. The Great Gatsby was last filmed in 1974 with
Robert Redford and Mia Farrow playing the leads, and the film was very much a
tragic romance, starring two of the most popular romantic leads of the
time. This impression was
surely reinforced by the romantic fallacy that ‘good looking’ people are also
possessed of a good character.
Carrie Mulligan’s performance in Baz Lurhrmann’s new film may not suffer
to much in comparison, but Leonardo Decaprio’s seems to have suffered in some people’s eyes by being seen
as less romantic than Redford’s and his morality more open to question. The essential question is, of course, which
characterization is truer to the book?
And
it is not only our moral sense of the characters that can be challenged, but
also that of the book. For
instance, Baz ’s version of Gatsby has been criticized by Mike Betha, the film critic of The
Philadelphia Inquirer,
because it seemed to distort the values fans of the story hold so
dearly. I wonder just what those values might be? Betha says that the film makes us
‘intoxicated by the partying of the second act, but leaves us with a
hangover in the third’. But I woud argue that this
is exactly what Fitzgerald intended. He wanted to show us the totally over-the-top excess
of the Jazz Age, and of course he did so in his own precise prose style. No Gonzo writing for
him. You can film his
narrative, but not his prose. So,
as Todd McCarthy, of the Hollywood Reporter writes, given the immoderate
lifestyle of the title character, (Luhrmann’s) approach is not exactly inappropriate, even if it is at
sharp odds with the refined nature of the author's prose. Having shown us
the partying Fitzgerald then shows us the aftermath. Gatsby is not a feel-good movie. The hangover is his, literally.
And he wanted to share it with us.
If
the values we hold dearly are subverted
by the film, whose values are they?
Surely not those of Jay Gatsby? We will back come to Scott Fitzgerald’s
values later, but first let’s stay with the difference between novels and
films.
You
cannot film prose. You can film dialogue and stage directions, but not the
author’s voice. In
moderation, as in Luhrmann’s’ Gatsby, description can be turned
into voice-over or even written soliloquy. But when the
author uses a narrator, as Fitzgerald used Nick Carraway, the narrator is not
the author. McCarthy writes
that 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.
We should be
careful not to adopt the values and judgments of a narrator. Nick may well hero worship Jay,
be dazzled by him and want to hang on to his ‘values’. but Fitzgerald does not.
This is not Nick’s story. It is a
story he tells, and tells it the way he sees it, the only way he can, but he is
inevitably an unreliable narrator. Some distance is necessary for perspective.
It also needs to be said that films that are too ‘literary’
usually do not work well.
The 1974 film of Gatsby was a failure for many reasons, but one of them
is that it had too much respect for the prose. It tried to be as ‘cool’ as Fitzgerald’s
writing, but what Fitzgerald was writing about was frenetic. Some films fail because
without the author’s voice too much is lost – think of Doctor Zhivago. Many swooned at Omar Sharif’s
middle distance gaze, but that is not what Pasternak’s book was about. Even the relatively successful
adaptation of The Name of the Rose only worked well on screen
because the narrative and characters Umberto Eco had invented were gripping
enough to carry the film, even if the actual philosophical and theological
baggage the narrative was designed to carry had to be jettisoned. Very often the only real
wisdom in a book is found in the author’s voice, not the characters’ voices. Sometimes the characters and plot
carry us through, as in The English Patient. The major characters may be smart and clever, but apart from the
bomb disposal officer Kip, they
have very little wisdom. The
wisdom is that of Michael Ondaatje. The books that translate most easily onto the
screen are plot driven thrillers and fantasies. But every now and again a cinematic
genius with a deep literary sensibility comes along, and John Huston gives us
James Joyce’s The Dead.
A film-maker
can allude to the author’s prose, with a voice over, or as Luhrmann does at times,
by showing us Nick’s journal-writings on screen, but once again they are Nick’s
thoughts we read, not Fitzgerald’s. So we need to see past Nick and Daisy and
Jay in order to get to Fitzgerald.
But that does not mean that we cannot be allowed to be as entranced, for
a while, as Nick is with Jay, and Daisy and Jay are by each other. But their real romance existed
only in their pasts, and they cannot go back there. All innocence has been lost, not only that of
these two iconic characters, but that of the Jazz Age itself, madly in love
with itself as it was.
A mad,
hedonistic party has to be filmed as such, and who better than Fuhrman, and his
co-creator and wife Caroline Martin,
to do so. This
is the Moulin Rouge
transplanted to Long Island.
Luhrmann is not filming these party scenes in ways that overtly
criticize them. He is filming them
the way they must have felt to Nick, and leaving us to stand back and judge
them. It is our judgments
and values that matter, informed by Fitzgerald’s prose, translated by
Luhrmann’s images.
So
when I saw this film I expected to be caught up in the glamour, the totally
over the top indulgence, and to see Daisy as wonderful, captivating, and utterly adorable, to fall for Jay’s
charm and line, to be caught up in his passion for Daisy – the only innocent
thing about him. As David Edelstein of CBS commented, for all its polish,
the book has a healthy American vulgarity that the genteel 1974 film with
Robert Redford and Mia Farrow didn't get. If you want deliberate vulgarity, look to Baz
Lehman. He knows how to
deliver it with style.
But I
also expected to taste the eventual disillusionment, the bitter dregs, to feel
the hangover, to feel betrayed even, just as so many ‘mad young things’ were
betrayed by the illusions of the times. Fitzgerald did not write to praise the Jazz Age, but
to bury it. He and Zelda were also
its victims, and Gatsby
shows us why any of us might also have fallen for it, given the
opportunity.
Fitzgerald
told his daughter Scottie that he had chosen literature as his pulpit and The
Great Gatsby is a great political sermon,
because its author understood how it all this came to be, and the price that
wouold have to be paid.
Gatsby
is prophetic, written before the Fall, as it were. The fortunes that fed the 1920’s hedonism
were scarcely more respectable than Jay’s money, even if some of them had the
patina that a couple of generations endows. It was not ‘old money’ in European terms, but old
enough. And did riches
bring nobility? Tom
Buchanan’s character suggests
otherwise. Did the gap
in wealth bring about compassion for the poorer? Myrtle finds out that this is
not the case. Everyone
is deluded, except Tom, who needs no illusions.
Let
us not forget that the riches of the late 1920’s and early 30’s crashed, and that crash triggered fascism in
many parts of the world, not just Germany. Most of the reforming social and political
movements are a reaction against injustice. The uncontrolled Free Market Capitalism of the post
late 19th and early 20c century triggered European Fascism.
Fitzgerald saw that coming in Italy, in the early days of Mussolini. Fascism was the hangover after the
party, and it was a violent conflict because those who lost wanted scapegoats,
and blamed the people who were never invited to the party in the first
place. As he wrote in
a letter to Roger Berlingham in 1925. (Italy) is a dead land where everything that could
be said or done was done long ago – for whoever is deceived by the
pseudo-activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a
corpse.
Scott
Fitzgerald was a political writer and Gatsby is not a love story. It describes love, obsessive,
ego-centric, nostalgic love, but the love story here is simply a vehicle, as it
is in Anna Karenina, for something much more
meaningful, and deeply political.
If Baz Lehman’s film leaves us with a bitter taste in our mouths it
means he has done his translation well.
The
literary academic Sarah Churchwell
sees The Great Gatsby
as a "cautionary tale of the decadent downside of the American
dream". As
she writes "there seemed little doubt about what was going to
happen, America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history. By the early 1920s, Fitzgerald could already sense that "the
whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous
corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in
prohibition". By 1924,
he was painting an indelible picture of that new life, setting his new novel in
1922 (just after the "general decision to be amused that began with the
cocktail parties of 1921"), in order to tell of "a whole race going
hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. It was borrowed time anyhow – the whole
upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the
casualness of chorus girls." Less than five years
after Gatsby was published, the market would crash, and the
Great Depression fell like a curtain over the festivities.” (Sarah Churchwell Careless
People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Virago, 2013.)
Churchwell goes on to say that ‘the jazz age may have ended,
but …nearly a century later, his cautionary tale has returned to haunt us,
warning again of the perils of boom and bust, holding a mirror up to our
tarnished world…. The historical irony is that Gatsby is destroyed because in
his world money did not make everything possible – but in our world it
increasingly does. Today the illusion of Jay Gatsby would not have shattered
like glass against Tom Buchanan's "hard malice". : Gatsby's money
would have insulated him and guaranteed triumph – an outcome that Fitzgerald
would have deplored more than anyone.’ And later ‘Gatsby is destroyed by the founding American
myth: that the marketplace can be a religion, that the material can ever be
ideal.’
Churchwell knows that “for the most part Fitzgerald's prose is a
kind of experiment in restrained extravagance. Just as the style is nearly paradoxical in its ability to
cut both ways, so are the novel's meanings. It is a celebration of
intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness.’
All this is very well said, but she dislikes the film because it
dares the same paradox.
Luhrmann gives us both the illusion and the gritty reality, the
celebration of intemperance and
the condemnation of its destructiveness, and he has to do so in visual ways,
rather than literary.
I do not think that literary critics are always well suited to be
film critics.
They often value the wrong – by which I mean inappropriate –
virtues, and therefore make false
judgments. Literary critics
love prose. But film is not
prose. Prose ‘tells’, film
‘shows’, so the quality of the
telling must be translated into the quality of the showing. I first spotted this
critical bias thirty years ago when the critics scorned Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner.
Watching The
Great Gatsby I though
DiCaprio’s performance was perfect, catching the manic and the obsessive and
the potentially violent alongside the naïve and utterly vulnerable aspects of
his character. Daisy is so
underwritten it is hard to make her sympathetic, but Carrie Mulligan did her
considerable best.
Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan – who Fitzgerald thought the best
character he has written – see below -
was very good indeed, as also were Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher as
George and Myrtle. I thought
Nick was played by Toby Maguire as well as such a passive character could be,
and the framing device worked for me. The meeting of Jay and Daisy (which again Fitzgerald
thought was the best chapter in the book) was tender, tentative, comic and
moving.
The
direction and design were as bold and outrageous as the times they portrayed,
and brought the prose to life thanks to Baz and his co-Producer, Production and
Wardrobe Designer (and wife) Catherine Martin. The use of the 3D was the among the best I have seen,
deliberately obvious in the opening credits and used to spectacular effect in
some scenes but subtle otherwise. The musical choices were brave and
brilliant, ranging from Beyonce
singing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black , through Jay-Z (writing under various
pseudonyms), Florence and the
Machine, Lana del Ray, Bryan
Ferry, Jack White and Bono, to Cole Porter, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, W.
C. Handy and George Gershwin, all under the musical production of Jay-Z and
with the original compositions and orchestrations of Craig Armstrong.
I end
with this, from Roger Ebert, the late lamented film Critic of the Chicago
Times, about
the book, not the film.
‘(Gatsby) is a
celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is
about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of
delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It
is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real
life. As Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins wrote in 1925: it is "a story
that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism". The hard
facts of power and economics play out against the mythological promises of
fantasy and ideology. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is
inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back
home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past. We find ourselves surveying
the waste and wreckage after the party ends, but ready to carouse some more’.
I think ’s
Gatsby is among the very best – and most accurate – translations of any book to
the screen, and if anyone feels let down by I recommend they go back to the
text and see what F. Scott Fitzgerald was really saying – and not just how he
was saying it.
