1   Gatsby Gatsby Gatsby

My friend Max called me up a few months ago and said he had had to read The Great Gatsby (he is a junior in high school) and . . . he hated it!

Here is what Max said. A thoughtless person reading Gatsby would conclude that people with money are fake and live superficial lives, doing whatever they want because they are rich, that they are careless and insensitive and egotistical—whether they be old money or nouveau riche. Fitzgerald gives us a stereotype and it is awful. Gatsby himself is a giant joke and a liar. Max hated Nick Carraway: he is a well-educated but unreliable narrator, who—despite the opening lines with his father’s advice not to judge people—judges everyone. And anyway this is not a profound idea. The last line—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”—is a cheap ending. Fitzgerald is a scoundrel. He takes cheap shots at the American Dream saying oh well sure you are rich but are you really living? To which Max replies: of course they are living! The idea that if you are rich you can’t be happy is something that comes from envious people who want to be rich but can’t and this upsets them so they say nasty things about the upper class. The book is a joke. Awful propaganda. Just plain wrong.

Max is capable of taking on the entire literary establishment . . . and winning!

Since I had always thought the novel was just high-gloss melodrama, I was delighted with Max’s take-no-prisoners assault.

The novel does have one truly great line. Jordan Baker says: “Anyhow, he gives large parties. And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” This remark is worthy of (the often underestimated) Oscar Wilde: while appearing to be just a clever bon mot, it is a deep and useful insight.

But aside from that one line, the novel is forgettable.

Nick says Gatsby “represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn.”

But immediately after that he says: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

The next line is: “No Gatsby turned out all right at the end . . . .”

Much later he says to Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd. . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Are any of these (sometimes contradictory) statements true? There is no evidence to support them.

Since Nick (and Fitzgerald) is not being ironic, there can be only one explanation: Nick is gay, finds Gatsby gorgeous and irresistible, and has fallen madly in love with him. He knows down deep that Gatsby is a shallow poseur—thus the “unaffected scorn”—but he is so in love with him that he throws all caution to the wind.

In Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954), Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), like Tom and Daisy, is a careless rich person. But after he causes a tragedy, he feels remorse for the harm he has done to Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman)—with whom he falls in love—and devotes his life to curing her blindness. His obsession is indeed magnificent.

Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy. But his obsession is not magnificent. It is pathetic.

Fitzgerald did write at least one great novel: The Last Tycoon. And it was made into a truly great film by director Elia Kazan—aided by great acting (particularly by Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell), a first-rate script by Harold Pinter, and a beautiful score by Maurice Jarre.

But The Great Gatsby does not measure up. Of course sometimes a so-so novel can be transformed into a great film. François Truffaut made Shoot the Piano Player from Down There by David Goodis. Hitchcock’s The Birds was based on a thin short story by Daphne Du Maurier. There have been quite a number of films made of The Great Gatsby. Let’s look at three of them and see how they stack up.

Jack Clayton directed the 1974 version with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston. Farrow’s Daisy is just right: glittery with nervous energy but not quite there for anyone. You can see how Gatsby as an inexperienced young man could have become foolishly enchanted with her. Karen Black steals the show with her perfect Myrtle Wilson: so vulnerable and intense and sexy you want to jump into the screen and kiss her all over.

In the 2000 version, director Robert Markowitz is uninspired and so Daisy (Mira Sorvino), Gatsby (Toby Stephens), and Nick (Paul Rudd) never come to life. They seem to be sleepwalking.

But neither version succeeds. They make two fundamental mistakes. They believe the novel is un objet sacré that must be faithfully recreated. And they both present Gatsby as a tragic and heroic figure.

I went to the Baz Luhrmann version (2013) expecting much the same . . . but was pleasantly surprised.

Luhrmann uses the novel as raw material and gives us a Gatsby liberated from itself.

The first half is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of supersaturated intensity. New York as an explosion of wildness: wild parties at Gatsby’s, wild car rides, and a camera that wildly zooms in and wildly zooms out.

And the music! Luhrmann—freed from any belief that he must use only music from the 20s—makes inspired choices that include songs from today. Here are some of them: