Gatsby adapted to 3D
Nobody insists on word to word “faithfulness” for adaptations of great literary classics, but there is an ongoing debate about how much a film is able to preserve the “meaning” or the “spirit” of the original. It is far more interesting to consider what kind of new interpretation a certain director can give to the original literary source material. Famous for his grandiose style, director Baz Luhrmann adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel according to the taste of today’s spectacle-obsessed cinemagoers.
We think of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s main work, The Great Gatsby, as one of the “Great American Novels” of the 20th century, whose main historical value is that it gives a precise description of the period of the 1920’s in the USA. Thanks to prohibition, smuggling flourished and the jazz age was raving. Gangsters, slackening morals and the booming atmosphere lead indirectly to the great depression. Fitzgerald’s work, written in 1925, is a critical diagnosis of the roaring 20’s society.
Just one year after Fitzgerald’s novel, the first Gatsby movie was produced (although unfortunately no copies survived) and a film noir adaptation was made in 1949. In 1974 the version best known till now, directed by Jack Clayton – and with stars like Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in the lead roles – was released, and a forgotten television version was shot in 2000. Now, almost 90 years later, Baz Luhrmann, too, has completed his own 21st century interpretation.
The style maketh the director
“A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”[1] – writes Fitzgerald. With these lines we enter into Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s elegant house. In the film, too, this is the scene when we see Daisy for the first time. Luhrmann breathtakingly adapts Fitzgerald’s description to the screen; the air-dance of the vast, snow white, curtains enchanting the viewer as the scene begins. By the time the characters manage to close the windows again, it becomes obvious for the viewers that they are going to see a film with an unbelievably expressive style, so typical of Luhrmann.
Brian McFarlane tried to define the different kinds of adaptations.[2] In his opinion, the main problem with adaptation theory is that critiques do not differentiate between narrative and narration. To put it simply, the former means the content of the story, while the latter means how this content is told. The elements of the narrative do not need to be changed, as they are easy to transfer and transform to the screen. Instead, it is the narration that needs to be adapted. We could also recall Bordwell’s definition[3], who identified one further category with regards to narration: he added the style next to the plot and the story. Similarly to McFarlane, he defines the story as a chronological chain of events, happening in a defined space and time, constituting a pattern of interpretation that is built up in the viewer’s head. What we actually see coming alive on the screen is the plot. The story is the frame of the puzzle and its pieces find their right places with the help of the plot. Considering these aspects he claims that the plot is actually independent from the medium and the same plot can be expressed both on paper or screen. According to Bordwell’s system, it is the style that differentiates the two media: the plot builds the dramaturgy, while the style is responsible for the technical outcome. In Luhrmann’s case, the style is definitely the most important expression.
Coming from a theatrical background, the director has already shown how important the overemphasised visuality is for him in the worlds he created in previous films. Since Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, this exaggerated visuality became the director’s auteur trademark (the work of Luhrmann’s permanent costume- and set designer Catherine Martin – who is also his wife – was nominated for the Oscar award several times.) The unusual punctuations show that the director prefers extravagance even in his titles’ visual appearances. His films are grandiose on one hand, with some attraction towards kitsch on the other, and a playful wink towards the viewer is always present. The question is, to what extent can this auteur trademark, the exaggerated visuality, be further enhanced; where is the point where it turns into too much (or way beyond over the top) and becomes simple vulgarity?
While the 19th century Parisian cabaret environment of Moulin Rouge! was calling for songs and colourful costumes, and putting Shakespeare’s eternal drama into a modern environment with creative stylization gave room to play with different genres, the bombastic style (not to mention the 3D) is less compatible with The Great Gatsby’stotally realistic story. Reading the novel, it is likely that the director was fascinated by the visual energy of sentences like “...and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park.”[4] ...“By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls.”[5] ...”I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.”[6]
Restlessness, amusement park, circus, stunts and hilarity are all expressions that fit perfectly well into Luhrmann’s expressive visual world. However, while in the novel the description of the luxurious parties – through the point of view of the amazed Nick, who has just arrived to the city – is episodic and a tool to depict the empty and worthless world of the rich, for Luhrmann this very tool becomes the goal. The film was created for the pompous (and caricatured?) portrayal of this gorgeous (though empty) world.
The carefully designed (till the very last detail) and precisely built up visual world almost suppresses the story. With each frame we are taken aback with the beauty of the pictures, Luhrmann deploying every possible filmic device to maximum effect. With the 3D projection, the sweeping camera movements in every direction, racing zooms and the over-squeezed compositions of the party scenes shot from unusual angels the viewer is hardly able to take in the spectacle. And throughout a question fumbles in our brains: is it possible, or even necessary to intensify this further? We almost see the director shooting the scene in front of our eyes: “No, there is a small empty room there, we need to put something there, one more dancer, banging champagne, more glitter and confetti.” Finally we reach the point where the exaggeration is no longer only irony, but more likely a tool to win a broader audience. We cannot get rid of the feeling that it is needed to make everybody understand what the story is about: behind the luxury, only emptiness is hidden.
This could raise the question of whether Luhrmann – who is notorious for his style – was the right choice of director to adapt the great American novel. Some even objected to the director that he “misread” Fitzgerald’s work and he romanticised the luxury of the rich instead of emphasising the emptiness behind the pompousness. However, in my opinion, the viewer can really feel the original meaning behind the unbelievably enhanced visuality, and Luhrmann did understand what it was really about. He also finds a very creative solution with his own visual instruments for the delayed entrance of the mysterious protagonist. We are more than half an hour into the film when we get a glimpse of Gatsby for the first time. Finally, we can see his face and his winsome smile flashes out, while fireworks are lit behind him in the sky and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue starts to play. Even if he had jumped out of a cake, it could not have been a more impressive entrance. Or maybe we are not watching the rapturous and ecstatic 1920’s but our own spectacle-obsessed era through a mocking glass? Does our own age look back at us, dressed in slightly different clothes?
The most likely reason why The Great Gatsby received such divided criticism is that it is difficult to decide whether Luhrmann's depiction is over the top (which also means simplified) so that he can bring the original meaning of the novel closer, for a broader audience, or if his goal is caricaturing, enhancing the negative portrayal of the society in order to illustrate it with a satirical overtone. Maybe appearance of this mere opposition in itself is Luhrmann’s virtue, so that he can elegantly whisk at both opinions as a laughing third.
Clayton vs. Luhrmann
The pompousness and the luxury played an important part in the 1974 version. That the difference between adaptations can be grasped through the style is obvious in the two different film versions’ examples. With adaptations of great literary works, “faithfulness” is a constant debate about how much the filmic version manages to reflect the “meaning” of the original. More exciting than this is the way a given director reads the source material and what kind of new interpretation they could give to the original work. Jack Clayton’s 1974 version is slow in its tempo, clinging to the original novel’s plot and even to its sentences, to the smallest detail. The director concentrates more on feelings, so for example the scenes depicting Gatsby and Daisy rekindling their love get significant emphasis. Furthermore, Clayton not only clings to the original sentences of the novel but tried to adapt its symbols to screen, so the picture of a solitary blinking green light (as a symbol of the unreachable ideal) is incomprehensible without reading. In contrast with this, Luhrmann’s version is a very energetic work with voluble, fast rhythm and saturated pictures. The green light as symbol also appears in this version but from an opposite point of view: over-explained. Luhrmann does not shy away from verbally explaining the symbolic meaning of the image. Apart from Nick’s explanation – he as a narrator puts into words what the green light means for Gatsby – it is also referred to again in the dialogues (here again, we feel the intention is surely to make the wider audience understand.)
Regarding the structure of the story it is important to analyse which parts of the novel were omitted from either adaptation. In the novel, thanks to the original subjective narrator, sometimes we jump back and forth in time. For example, we learn the life history of the protagonist from Nick earlier, however he mentions that Gatsby only told this to him later, while they were waiting together after the night of the accident, to which point we only get later in the story. To portray the past of the mysterious protagonist the two directors chose two different kinds of solutions. Of course there is also a difference in the characters performed by the two different actors. Luhrmann shows the past of the young James, the low-class origin and then the start of his career as a sailor in pictures. In Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance one can feel the endless determination, the determined clambering up of a low-born boy. In comparison, Clayton does not show Gatsby’s past. Moreover, Gatsby does not tell his story to Nick. This way, Redford’s character is more mysterious, a little bit like Charles Foster Kane, of whom everybody has his or her own version of a story, but nobody knows the truth. One of Luhrmann’s central scenes (in terms of suspense and acting) is when Gatsby loses his temper and looks able to kill a man. In comparison, in Clayton’s version this scene is entirely missing; it would not have suited Redford’s self-restrained gentlemanliness.
In the earlier version, we only get a glimpse into Gatsby’s past at the end of the story, after his death, through the character of his father coming for the funeral. This character is entirely missing from Luhrmann’s version, which unfortunately results in the effect of losing depth compared to the emotionally more sophisticated novel. Here again, Clayton is more “faithful” and he tries to grasp Gatsby’s character through the figure of the father. Mr Gatz shows Nick his son’s old book, in which he had accidentally stumbled upon a “to do list” written by Gatsby. This short list covering a whole lifestyle is an extremely telling character description in a few lines (which is of course to Fitzgerald’s merit). Clayton must have liked this solution too, since the reading out of the “to do list” by the father turns from diegetic to non-diegetic at the end of the film and we hear these lines during Gatsby’s funeral. Here, the question emerges again of whether it is a well functioning solution for depicting a character into whose past we did not have any insight before.
An alcoholic’s narration from a clinic
In the 2013 version, Luhrmann, together with scriptwriter Craig Pearce, adds a frame story to the original. It turns out at the beginning of the film that we are already in 1929; the age of the roaring 20’s is over, the stock market has crashed and we look at the previous years as history. According to the original novel, we get to know everything from the perspective of Nick Carraway. He is an unreliable, subjective narrator, which the director further emphasises by putting Nick into a clinic, from where he narrates the story. As part of his treatment and under his therapist’s advice he has to write the past out of himself. Nick suffers from chronic alcoholism and insomnia as if some ironic hint of the after-effect of all the irresponsible, boisterous, drinking going on in the story itself (and as a reference to the fact that the writer Fitzgerald suffered from serious alcoholism at the end of his life.) Nick’s reminiscence gives a flashback frame to the story. As he starts to put Gatsby’s – and through him his own – story on paper, letters, words and sentences form on the screen in front of us. This way we start with a postmodern wink, with the self reflective gesture of a work that writes itself as the story goes forward. Nick (and the viewer) lives through the story by writing it down for us. The work is born by the story being told.
Nick’s role as a narrator was an interesting solution in the Fitzgerald novel, because there is a love story in the centre of the novel, which is told not by either “protagonist”, but by an outsider third person. The novel, written in the first person singular in the perspective of the story, is the narration of an outsider but, at the same time, insider. While the main character of the story and the title is Gatsby, we see everything with Nick’s eyes. He tries to uphold this subjective narrator position during the film too by showing scenes where Nick was also present, at least as a far distant observer (however there are some exceptions; for example we hear Gatsby’s death and the car accident in Carraway’s narration, although he himself was not present at these events.) Luhrmann’s film uses the subjective narrator more consistently than Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation, where Nick is a kind of “pretended” subjective narrator. He recalls the novel in his storytelling, but we watch the film from an omnipotent point of view, since we see plenty of scenes where Nick simply could not have been present (the romantic trysts of Gatsby and Daisy, the secret rendezvous of Myrtle and Tom or the fights of Myrtle and Wilson.)
Is it possible to love Gatsby?
But who is The Great Gatsby really about? About Gatsby chasing the past? About Nick observing from outside? Perhaps about Daisy, the embodiment of idealised love? About the whole American society back then? About a hopeless dreamer? A determined self made man? And then who is the protagonist? This is also a problematic pivotal point of the adaptation. Originally, in the novel, we are not able to really identify with any of the characters. Although the story is about Gatsby, we never get a glimpse into his thoughts, precisely because of the outside narrator. On the other hand, we cannot identify fully with Nick either, since he is telling someone else’s story, and although a little light falls on some of his character traits too during the storytelling, he is never in the centre.
An interesting question is how much emphasis is put on Daisy’s character in the story. While Luhrmann chose the solution to show Daisy and Gatsby’s young love in a flashback while Gatsby tells the story of their past to Nick, Clayton verbalizes this again and we only get to know the protagonists’ past from their conversations. The extent to which Daisy is unworthy of Gatsby’s love and the huge rift gaping between her real self and Gatsby’s idealised dream figure of her is more apparent in Clayton’s version. Here, Daisy not only does not go to the funeral, but when she later meets Nick again she acts extremely superficially and is only able to talk about dinner invitations and house renovations. In comparison, Luhrmann’s story ends with the funeral itself and he does not show any kind of reactions from Daisy’s side. This way it does not come up in the story on any kind of level, what effect it had on Daisy that she killed a human being (by running her over.) There are more secrets behind the endless narcissism and the sophistication, only veiling her emptiness, in the character of Daisy performed by Mia Farrow, continuously talking in a high pitched voice, while the Carey Mulligan’s character is only simply charming.
Meyer Wolfsheim is an especially important figure of the novel; he is the character of the antihero. It is with his appearance that we start to suspect that Gatsby is not the kind of “Oxford man” he claims himself to be and that he probably has suspicious deals with underworld figures. Wolfsheim is a crucial, though not easily interpretable, figure in the novel. He is Gatsby’s counterpoint, who keeps on living after Gatsby’s death as a living proof that idealist dreaming and reflecting on the past is not the kind of philosophy needed to reach the American dream. In the 1974 version he arouses fear by telling a story about a bloody mafia payoff and by wearing human teeth as his cuff-links. Luhrmann applied an interesting solution to portray his character: he cast the legendary Indian bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan in Wolfsheim’s role. His short appearance is one of the strongest scenes in the film; he is a sinister threat in mere physical presence (which only goes unnoticed by Nick.) Luhrmann allotted the meaning on the visuals again; Bachchan does not even need to open his mouth, his mere presence is enough to make us sure that he is a dangerous underworld figure.
It is a difficult task to adapt The Great Gatsby to film, since the essence and success of the novel does not lie in its plot, but rather hides in its abstract meaning. Besides being a precise description of an era, it is also about lost dreams, illusions and the irreversibility of the past. The 1974 version reflect this by clinging to the language of the novel to the very last detail, which makes the film seem slow and too full of dialogue, like it was a picture illustration of the novel. Luhrmann also tried to emphasise the irreversibility of the past: in his version it is mentioned in Gatsby and Nick’s dialogue. Luhrmann’s directorial interpretation could be supported by the argument that he was trying to make a great literary classic accessible for an audience that does not really pick books up with their hands anymore. But the question remains: how much does this attitude legitimatise the “simplification” of the original work? The experience is not the same when we “read” the abridged extract instead of the original novel, even if we understand the “meaning.”
Neither of the films managed to penetrate the mysteriousness of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. Despite his underworld dealings, Gatsby is a romantic dreamer. As a devoted idealist clinging to the past he becomes the victim of the recklessness of the irresponsible rich, of whom Daisy is a main representative on the side of her husband, Tom. This is there in words in both of the films ("They're a rotten crowd - you're worth more than the whole lot of them put together."), but we do not really feel it in either one. Maybe this is the constant problem of adaptations: a film version can never equally satisfy everybody’s imagination.
Works cited
Bordwell, David: Narration in the Fiction Film. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1930.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby. Penguin Books, London, 1950.
McFarlane, Brian: Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. University Press, Oxford, 1996.
originally published in Hungarian at:
http://prae.hu/prae/articles.php?aid=6241
Fitzgerald, F. Scott:
The Great Gatsby.
Penguin Books, London, 1950. p. 13.
McFarlane, Brian:
Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation.
University Press, Oxford, 1996. pp. 19-22.
Bordwell, David:
Narration in the Fiction Film.
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1930. p. 62.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott:
The Great Gatsby.
Penguin Books, London, 1950. p. 43.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott:
The Great Gatsby.
Penguin Books, London, 1950. p. 48.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott:
The Great Gatsby.
Penguin Books, London, 1950. p. 57.
The Great Gatsby (2013)
143 min - Drama | Romance - 10 May 2013 (USA)
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers: Baz Luhrmann, Craig Pearce
Music: Craig Armstrong
Cinematography: Simon Duggan
Producers: Lucy Fisher, Catherine Knapman, Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Douglas Wick
Editing: Jason Ballantine, Jonathan Redmond, Matt Villa
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby), Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), Amitabh Bachchan (Meyer Wolfsheim), Jason Clarke (George Wilson), Callan McAuliffe (teen Jay Gatsby)
The Great Gatsby (1974)
144 min - Drama | Romance - 29 March 1974 (USA)
Director: Jack Clayton
Novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Music: Nelson Riddle
Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe
Producers: David Merrick
Editing: Tom Priestley
Stars: Robert Redford (Jay Gatsby), Mia Farrow (Daisy Buchanan), Sam Waterston (Nick Carraway), Bruce Dern (Tom Buchanan), Karen Black (Myrtle Wilson), Scott Wilson (George Wilson), Lois Chiles (Jordan Baker), Roberts Blossom (Mr. Gatz), Patsy Kensit (Pamela Buchanan)