newport international group blog articles

The Great Gatsby:
the secret of the
story's appeal
newport international group blog
articles

Baz Luhrmann is the sixth film-maker to attempt to translate The Great
Gatsby from page to screen. But what is it about this slim novel that
makes it so endlessly fascinating, asks David Gritten.
In 1974, Time magazine ran a cover story titled “The Great Gatsby
Supersell”, with a photo of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, the stars of
that year’s film adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, gazing into
each other’s eyes. The basis of the story was that the hype
surrounding the movie was overwhelming.
Four decades on, those of us who recall the Redford-Farrow Gatsby
may be feeling a distinct sense of déjà vu. Gatsby-mania is again
running rampant, largely due to the imminent arrival of Baz
Luhrmann’s eagerly awaited film adaptation of the novel.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the enigmatic, self-made, wildly wealthy
Jay Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as the love of his life, callow, capricious
Daisy Buchanan, it opens the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
There’s a nice symmetry here: in the Twenties, Fitzgerald, his wife
Zelda and their affluent, hedonistic friends established the French
Riviera as a smart-set destination.

Again the hype machines are in overdrive. By now half the world
knows that the film is in 3-D, and has a lavish Art Deco look. It’s hardly
a secret that Brooks Brothers supplied Gatsby’s gorgeous clothes for
DiCaprio, that Prada did the same for Mulligan, or that the
contemporary soundtrack features Jay-Z, Beyoncé, will.i.am and Emeli
Sandé.
It also knows that the American critics have been decidedly mixed in
their response; while some have praised its vibrant spirit and energy,
and many have admired DiCaprio’s central performance, David Denby
in The New Yorker deplored its “vulgarity designed to win over the
young audience”. Scott Foundas in Variety suggested that “what
Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that
Fitzgerald was... offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the
American empire, not an invitation to the ball.
Whatever the European critics decide next week, they are unlikely to
puncture the ongoing Gatsby-mania. There is considerably more to it
than a single movie can satisfy. In Britain, Northern Ballet is now on
tour with a dance piece inspired by The Great Gatsby, featuring the
seven main characters in Fitzgerald’s work; it arrives at Sadler’s Wells
this coming Tuesday, and is almost sold out.

In the East End of London earlier this year, Wilton’s music hall hosted
an “immersive” theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby, in which
audiences were invited to arrive dressed in Twenties style and mingle
with the actors at a lavish party, dancing to jazz tunes and drinking
cocktails in a decadent Prohibition-era setting. Wilton’s first staged this
event last year, well before Luhrmann’s film was in a position to help
boost ticket sales.
Last summer also brought the London transfer of an off-Broadway
triumph called Gatz. Devised by the New York theatrical innovators,
the Elevator Repair Company, this wildly imaginative take on The Great
Gatsby, was set in a shabby New York office, lasted more than eight
hours and incorporated a reading of the entire novel out loud. Around
the same time, another London theatre served up a musical version of
Gatsby.
This year sees several new books on Gatsby and its author, including
one by Sarah Churchwell called Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and
the Invention of the Great Gatsby which traces the genesis of a novel
which she describes as “a universal tale of human aspiration.”

So how can we account for this apparently bottomless fascination with
The Great Gatsby? It’s a relatively short novel (fewer than 50,000
words), with a title character who is described only sketchily and who
speaks largely in banalities.
Yet Fitzgerald’s jewel-like prose relates a tale of doomed romanticism:
Jimmy Gatz, a poor farm boy from the Midwest, meets Daisy when she
is just 17, falls in love, loses her and spends his life trying to win her
back. Reinventing himself as stylish Jay Gatsby, he works tirelessly (and
outside the law) to become fabulously wealthy, and buys an opulent
Long Island mansion across a stretch of water from where Daisy lives
with Tom, her rich, brutish husband. There he throws lavish parties
with an open-door policy, convinced they will pique Daisy’s interest:
she will arrive, they will reunite. Meanwhile, at night, he gazes
wistfully at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, a light that
comes to symbolise all human dreaming.
In this way, there is a strong case to be made that it is the book’s
metaphorical power rather than its poignant story that has ensured its
place on the lists of greatest novels written in English. But it is also
true that its broader appeal lies in its glittering surface – Fitzgerald’s
perfect evocation of the Jazz Age.

It sounds so glamorous and alluring – not just the clothes, but the
forbidden cocktails, the wild parties, the jazz, with its implicit promise
of sex – and the sense that people had cast off the shackles of a grim
previous decade, overshadowed by the First World War, and decided
to seek pleasures and freedoms for their own sake, no matter what
the cost. In his later years, Fitzgerald, no stranger to hedonism and
excess himself, said of the time he described so vividly: “America was
going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”
There are those who argue that the actual plot of The Great Gatsby is
almost incidental to its popularity. David Nixon, the artistic director of
Northern Ballet, who directed, choreographed and designed the
costumes for the company’s Gatsby ballet, observes: “I don’t think it’s
the tale, I think it’s the time period. People just love that Twenties era
– the glamour, the music, the clothes. It’s easily conjured in their
imaginations. They don’t struggle to picture it.”
Nixon recently gave a talk to an audience after a performance: “I asked
how many people had read the book. Only about 10 per cent had. But
rather like Wuthering Heights, it’s a book people may feel they’ve read
when they haven’t. ”

To those who have read it more than once, the book feels different
each time; it’s like turning a multifaceted diamond in the palm of your
hand. At various life stages I’ve been struck in turn by the hedonism,
carelessness, inequality or underlying sadness of the age it depicts.
Given the novel’s evanescence, it’s easy to see the difficulty in
adapting it into a film. The late Matthew Bruccoli, an academic and
Fitzgerald biographer, was blunt about this, saying of Gatsby: “He’s
mythical, he’s make-believe. He works fine on paper, but he doesn’t
work on the screen.”
Gore Vidal also addressed the problems of adapting Fitzgerald’s words
for cinema, particularly the difficulty of catching the novel’s narration.
“It’s a tone of voice, and the tone of voice is that of the author,” he
said. “And films have no authors … it’s a collaborative effort.”
It’s unsurprising, then, that none of the previous cinematic versions of
Gatsby ever finds its way on to lists of greatest-ever films. After an
obscure silent film in 1926 – “Rotten,” wrote Zelda in a letter – Alan
Ladd starred in a dull, talky 1949 version, which cast Gatsby squarely
as a bootlegger, though an almost throwaway scene near the end of
the novel suggests he made his fortune by dabbling in fake bonds.

Still, it was marginally better than the adaptation starring Redford and
Farrow. It looked promising: Redford was the world’s biggest movie
star, and Francis Ford Coppola had written the script. But nothing
about handsome Wasp Redford suggested Tom Buchanan’s attack on
Gatsby in the book as a fraud: “An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He
wears a pink suit.”
Redford looked born to wealth and when the British director Jack
Clayton suggested he dyed his reddish-blond hair black to hint that
Gatsby was a man with a sinister, even criminal past, he refused.
Coppola’s script turned out to be a little too faithful to the novel’s plot
lines and the film misfired.
Two other versions have since sunk without trace: a television movie in
2000, partly BBC-funded, with Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino as the
leads; and a hip-hop adaptation of the story, simply called G (2002).
Getting Gatsby right has become cinema’s holy grail.
It would be the right time for Luhrmann to pull it off. Those Gatsby
productions across various media suggest there’s something in the
zeitgeist. One need not look too hard for parallels between our times
and Gatsby’s.

The Jazz Age began in earnest in 1922, the year in which Fitzgerald’s
novel is set, with a steep growth in conspicuous consumption,
advertising and sales of cars; it ended abruptly seven years later with
the Wall Street crash. In the past decade we have also seen the end of
a prosperous era, with the economic meltdown that began in 2008.
Our obsession with celebrity is also mirrored in the Jazz Age, with
Gatsby’s party guests gossiping about their host: “Somebody told me
they thought he killed a man once.”
Our rage about bankers’ bonuses, rich tax avoiders and foreign
plutocrats buying up swathes of London while life gets harder for the
poor is mirrored in the inequality portrayed by Fitzgerald: an acute
social critic, he dwells on “the valley of ashes”, a vile dumping ground
between Manhattan and Long Island, where Tom Buchanan’s mistress
Myrtle and her gloomy garage mechanic George live.
There’s enough material in The Great Gatsby for Luhrmann to fashion
a film that does justice to Fitzgerald and achieves resonance in our
lives today. Within a week, we’ll be able to see if he’s succeeded.

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