Has there ever been a truly great film made from a truly great novel? I liked the recent Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley even if no one else did, but I wouldn’t call it great. Maybe The Ice Storm, if we’re talking contemporary classics? (An oxymoron, but you know what I mean.) Generally, first-rank movies are built on pulpier foundations, like The Godfather or Gone with the Wind or Goldfinger.
And yet filmmakers continue to tackle the big ones, beating on like boats against the current (or whatever); enter Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, the marketing campaign for which is now careening down the turnpike like Gatsby’s “gorgeous . . . monstrous” cream-colored death car. But what of Hollywood’s most recent attempt to film Fitzgerald’s novel: the unloved 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow? (I’m ignoring a TV version made in 2000 for A&E that starred the British actor Toby Stephens as Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd—!!—as Nick Carraway.)
Is the Redford-Farrow Gatsby as lousy as its reputation? Or have four decades of perspective revealed it to be a misunderstood gem? I was hoping for the latter, but the former proved to be the case, though the movie stumbles in revealing ways. I hope Luhrmann studied it closely.
The 1974 film, like the new one, arrived amid a gusher of hype, especially surrounding the genuinely gorgeous costumes, designed by Theoni V. Aldredge (who won an Oscar), with assistance from then tyro Ralph Lauren. A Paramount marketing executive bragged that “the entire country will be Gatsby-ized.” And it might have been, but then the movie itself was released. Like many films that are extravagantly promoted, it did well enough at the box office, though no one was particularly enthusiastic about it—critics or audiences. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, offered a pretty good summary:
The film remains handsome and lavish-looking. Visually, it hasn’t dated much, and there are grace notes sprinkled throughout. It opens promisingly, too, with the camera gliding through the public rooms of Gatsby’s empty mansion, taking in as well, more intimately, his monogrammed bedspread and grooming kit and a fly on a sandwich, while music wafts and echoes on the soundtrack. Nick, played by a young and surprisingly sleek Sam Waterston, is then seen piloting a skiff across the sound (or whatever body of water it is that separates East and West Egg) on a summer’s late afternoon while Waterston, in voiceover, recites some introductory lines from the book. It’s perhaps too predictably tasteful and “literary,” but it’s not ineffective.
The problems start when the actors open their mouths. I would disagree with Canby that the performances are mostly exceptional: Karen Black, normally wonderful, overacts terribly as Myrtle Wilson, perhaps auditioning for her subsequent role as the valiant flight attendant in Airport ’75. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lois Chiles, as Jordan Baker, underacts to the point of not acting at all, just occupying space. Bruce Dern isn’t bad as Tom Buchanan, but he can’t seem to get a handle on the character, or maybe he’s just too good an actor to convey Tom’s essential callowness; the actor’s depth and sensitivity undercut the performance, if that makes sense. Waterston doesn’t find much to do with Nick, but then neither did Fitzgerald, aside from making Nick his mouthpiece.
Good, bad, or indifferent, none of these performers seem to be in the same movie, which is a failing of the director, Jack Clayton (an Englishman probably best known for Room at the Top). This disconnect extends to the leads as well. Redford, as always, makes the camera and the audience come to him, acting with little shifts in his eyes and twitches of his lips. He’s convincing in the early scenes, which require him to be both jocular and distant, and he handles the role’s most notoriously difficult aspect—calling everyone “old sport” without sounding too ridiculous—with aplomb. One wishes he were a more supple actor, though, in the more romantic and tremulous scenes. He never really bleeds, just nicks.
Farrow, meanwhile, is excellent as Daisy, full of vain flutter and the seductive instant intimacy of the careless rich. At times, though, her ethereal looks work against her; in a few of her close-ups, she’s a dead ringer for the star baby from 2001: A Space Odyssey, only with mascara and a string of first-rate pearls. A bigger issue, though, is whether she’s ultimately believable as the kind of passive femme fatale who could inspire Gatsby’s epic re-invention. She’s not, although it’s partly Redford’s fault: his recessiveness sometimes makes her go too big in their scenes together. A little chemistry between the leads would help, too. But it might be an impossible task for any actress, playing American literature’s ultimate object of desire, aside from Moby Dick. This is a joke, but I don’t think I’m wrong: Redford might have been a better Daisy.
(Good luck to Carey Mulligan, our new Daisy, who, perhaps feeling the weight on her shoulders, looks unenticingly mopey in the trailers.)
Beyond casting or direction, the 1974 film’s biggest fault lies in treating Gatsby as a grand, doomed romance when the novel is really a shrewd, streamlined near satire about a group of characters who are either nasty pieces of work or foolish or both. It’s wised up and funny and tough, more Neil LaBute than Nicholas Sparks. True, there’s a bruised heart at the bottom of it all, but it’s Fitzgerald’s, not Gatsby’s; the tragedy is almost outside the story, in inference. Francis Coppola, then at the height of his powers, is credited with the screenplay, but he and the former Paramount executive Peter Bart both say his script was paved over during the shoot; I’d love to read the original someday and see what he really made of the book.
From Hollywood’s point of view, The Great Gatsby might be as emptily, ruinously alluring as the title character’s parties. It’s got a great setting, big emotions, bad behavior, and a lurid ending, but its essence might be unfilmable, or at least uncommerical. I like Baz Luhrmann’s films, but I wonder if the director of Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge! will capture the anti-romantic shiver at the heart of Gatsby’s romance. Judging from the trailer, he seems to be going for something pop-operatic, which doesn’t bode well. Frankly, I’m also worried about DiCaprio’s accent—and more acutely, his “old sports.”