Why Making a Film of The Great Gatsby will Never Work

Anyone who knows me in the slightest quickly figures out that my favorite novel of all time is The Great Gatsby. Look at this blog. For nearly ten years I've maintained the kcgatsby domain (even though I haven't lived in Kansas City for five years). I named the blog Battling the Current in reference to the last line of the novel. And, most importantly, for years I mentioned in my profile that a fortune teller in New Orleans once told me that I was the reincarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and all I needed to do was find my Zelda. It took me a while but I did and for our anniversary this year she gave me a novel based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald.

All this is to say that there is no book that has ever stayed with me like Gatsby. I can discuss from memory so many scenes and symbols from the book. The green light, catching the clock, shirts flying in the air, a voice that sounds like money and the fading eyes on a billboard are some of the greatest pieces ever written by an American author. And every generation or so they try to make a movie out of the book and it fails. I haven't seen the latest (and I'm not planning on it) but I can't imagine it working. So, here are my reasons why you can't film Gatsby in a way that can match up to the book.

Point 1: The book isn't about Gatsby. Hollywood can never figure this out. The book is really about Nick and how he is changed by all that he sees around him in that one summer. How a boy from the hicks (technically the Midwest but even back then it was flyover country) is swept up in a scene and witnesses the undoing of lives all around him. He's the narrator, he's an observer but he is the one who undergoes the transformation. Sam Waterson fit the role, Tobey Maguire will probably do a good job, but it is incredibly difficult to focus a film on the character who is pretty bland instead of the enigmatic, charming title character. Speaking of that....

Point 2: Casting Gatsby is hell: They try, really they do, and the last two choices are good but not quite. The temptation is to pick the most charming, handsome actor in his 30s for the role, which is how we get Redford and Dicaprio in the role. But those actors by their nature of being charming and famous can't capture the innate character of Gatsby. First off, there is the realization that Gatsby began as a nobody. When he meets Daisy originally he is so far below her that nothing he can do, nothing he can say, can win her over. That inability to win, that desperation to get the girl and failing, that realization that you are not up to par is what sets Gatsby's life on its path. But for a star actor you can't ever imagine them like that because they always get the girl.

You also have to add on the fact that there is an incredible dark side to Gatsby's character. It's never clear how he made his money other than there was no way it was legal. I always viewed Gatsby as someone who when you looked at him you knew that he had done some really bad things in his past and he would do them again if necessary. Just the look of someone who had been to the dark side of life and while he didn't enjoy it he would return to reach his goal.

Point 3: The party scenes are great but they aren't the focus of the books: This is just a flaw in adaptation. The party scenes make for wonderful set pieces with amazing costumes and music and dancing and overall extravagance. Sadly, that makes the scenes all about the extravagance and not what is going on during the event, why it is happening at all, and how people react to it. You can get all of the style but you miss all of the substance. Oh, and for the love of God, Rihanna isn't in the goddamn book. Stuff like that makes me dread this movie.

Point 4: You can put the symbolism in the movie but that doesn't mean that people will get it: I can talk for hours about the symbolism in Gatsby. This is mainly because my high school English teacher worked to make me aware of what was in the story and what it meant and that you had to keep on looking deeper and deeper and thinking. When I write about Gatsby catching the clock and the glorious moment where he has made time stop and in that brief moment he has everything he has ever dreamed about I hear Riberdy's voice in my head (and realize wistfully that I did one day catch the clock myself). But it is symbolism that you have to work at to discover. The wonders of Gatsby is not the plot itself, which is actually relatively simple, but the words themselves. This brings me to my final point...

Point 5: The glory of The Great Gatsby is in its language, its tone and its flow and not in the story: Some books make wonderful movies because they are all plot. The Da Vinci Code was written to be a movie or possibly an episode of Scooby Doo. The characters exist but really if you wanted to change out the female lead with Daphne it would work (Thelma would be a bit of a stretch). But that is not the way Gatsby works.

You can't film a scene where you grasp the meaning of a line like "her voice was filled with money". You can't slow down a film like the book does as it goes through the lazy days of summer with characters talking about the longest day of the year and how we always look forward to it but never do anything about it. You can't catch the rhythm of the notes in the words, the way the book ebbs and flows, how it captures the transition from summer into fall and how everything collapses and decays. There is something about the nature of literature that allows you to create that image that cannot be duplicated on film. Books are a slower medium, a more reflective medium, and Gatsby is the book that the more you think about it the more you understand.

My guess is that Baz Luhrman is going to go wild with music and spectacle and costumes, pay some lip service to the novel and put something on screen that is pretty but not very true to the original. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. It's just that in my mind there is only one version of the story and it is the one I keep on my nightstand.

(Yes, and I am returning to blogging. Explanations to follow.)