Great Gatsby, The (DVD)

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"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

The 1974 production under consideration here was the third filming of F. Scott Fitzgerald's celebrated novel, the first being a 1926 silent version starring Warner Baxter and the second a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd. Like the 2001 television adaptation with Toby Stephens, they all met the same fate; namely, they were unable adequately to convey the book's poetic vision. Nevertheless, of the four screen attempts, it's this 1974 "Great Gatsby," helmed by British director Jack Clayton ("Room at the Top," "The Innocents," "The Pumpkin Eater"), that comes off best.

Or maybe I just like it because I've seen it so often, having taught American Lit. most of my career. Whatever, certainly the mainstream critics disapproved of it, some of them intensely, and audiences stayed away. While I agree with these reactions in part, maybe I can set some things right by injecting a note of optimism into broil.

But first things first. Fitzgerald published his novel in 1925, commenting to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, during the writing process that he was consciously striving to create a work of art. As such, the book became a multilayered narrative of manifold themes, symbols, and characterizations tied up in a lyrical prose style that would become a nightmare for filmmakers to translate to the screen.

The story hardly needs summing up for anyone who has gone through an American high school or college, but for the benefit of those who somehow missed it (or just can't remember it), the story superficially concerns the illicit love affair of a mysterious young man of fortune, Jay Gatsby, and a beautiful, young, rich, and very married East Coast woman of society, Daisy Buchanan. Only it's not. What I mean is, the story is really about the corrosive forces of wealth, class structures in a classless society, the elusive nature of happiness, and the loss of innocence and illusion, what reviewers at the time of the book's publication generally overlooked but what critics of the late forties finally picked up on and declared as a perfect depiction of the corruption of the American Dream.

Set against a background of the Roaring 20s, a term Fitzgerald helped coin, the Jazz Age, Prohibition, the rise of gangsterism, fast cars, and faster women, the story looks at the rich and the poor with equal disdain. It's both an indictment of the era and, ironically, a glorification of it. However, what the various movie versions over the years have concentrated on is the story's romance at the expensive of its spiritual and allegorical implications.

The weaknesses in the 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby" are easy to see if a person has recently read the book. For one thing, the film's too long. Fitzgerald's novel is a masterpiece of conciseness, as brief and insightful as the most powerful poetry in conveying to the reader as much as possible in as few words. The film is 146 minutes, almost two-and-a-half hours. Short novel; long film. Certainly, the filmmakers were trying their best to cram everything they could into the movie, but books and movies are two different animals and need to be treated differently. Where the novel seems a marvel of succinctness, the movie can seem endless, especially during several romantic, soft-focus sequences that appear to go on needlessly forever.

Worse, the film never achieves the lyrical grace of the novel, nor should it be expected to match the novel's elegance. Most of the book is told to us in the first person by a friend of Gatsby's, Nick Carraway, and scriptwriter Francis Ford Coppola (who took over for Truman Capote) does his best to condense the narration without using too much voice-over and to translate much of what is told to us into screen imagery. But there are some things that only words, not images, can convey. Take the line at the top of the review, for instance, which comes off in the movie as just another Gatsby party. Coppola even omits the book's famous last line, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Maybe he thought the line too ethereal or too ambiguous for moviegoers to comprehend. A novel, after all, allows readers time to think about each utterance at the moment it's read, whereas in a movie viewers are not given much chance for reflection until later, when it's usually too late.

Needless to say, the novel's thematic content is pretty much dismissed as well, with only the faintest allusions to the empty dreams of its protagonist drifting in and out of our awareness when it's over. In a way, I suppose that exemplifies what the book's all about, in any case, but I think Fitzgerald had a more tangible goal in mind for his figurative tale. Except for the narrator, however, the characters in the story are generally bereft of values or principles, and perhaps that is the one important point the movie does make clear. So all is not completely lost.

On the other hand, there are any number of things the movie does well, starting with the casting of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. Critics have complained that the actor was too refined, too suave, too much the Hollywood star to portray what Fitzgerald describes as an "elegant young roughneck." Conversely, critics complained that Redford sounded awkward in his phrasing. Possibly, we should take our clue from the word "elegant" rather than "roughneck," because that is precisely what Redford, as Gatsby, seeks to realize. Gatsby is the ultimate overachiever, right down to his attempts to appear sophisticated by over articulating his words and using phrases like "old sport." Redford nails it, still bringing a glamor to the part it sorely needs, and when Gatsby explains his compulsive attraction for Daisy by saying "Her voice is full of money," we can readily understand what he means.

The rest of the cast is equally fine. Sam Waterston plays the narrator, Nick Carraway. He's perhaps the best-cast performer in the film because he so perfectly fits the role. Not only is Waterston a superb actor, he looks ordinary, the Everyman that Nick is supposed to be; he's each of us looking in on a world far removed yet very close to our own. Mia Farrow plays Daisy with appropriately wide-eyed, empty-headed charm. Bruce Dern is Daisy's intimidating husband, Tom, not quite as physically imposing as the "brute" described in the novel, but just as arrogantly repulsive in his snobbish, boorish, elitist, racist way. Lois Chiles plays Jordan Baker, Daisy's best friend, with a voice so sexy you'll remember it long after you've forgotten the actress. Karen Black plays Tom's "other woman," Myrtle Wilson, far more attractive than the Myrtle imaged by Fitzgerald but every bit as slutty, tawdry, and cheap. And Scott Wilson plays George, Myrtle's cuckold husband, the poor sap who brings the story to its inevitable close.