What Does Nick Compare Gatsby to on the Final Page of the Book
How True-blue Is The Swell Gatsby?
Ever since Baz Luhrmann announced that he was adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby—and peculiarly after he revealed that he'd be doing it in 3-D—much digital ink has been spilled about the hideous sacrilege that was sure to follow. Nevermind that Luhrmann's previous accommodation, William Shakespeare'southward Romeo + Juliet, was quite true to both the language and the spirit of that legendary play; Gatsby, equally David Denby puts information technology in The New Yorker this week, is "as well intricate, besides subtle, besides tender for the movies," and particularly for such an unsubtle filmmaker as Luhrmann.
So the argument goes, anyway. In fact, Fitzgerald's novel, while great, is not, for the almost part, terribly subtle. And though it has moments of real tenderness, it also has melodrama, murder, adultery, and, of form, wild parties. In whatsoever example, we tin put bated, for the moment, the larger question of whether Luhrmann captured the spirit of Gatsby, which is very much open for argue. There's a simpler question to address first: How faithful was the filmmaker to the letter of the alphabet of Fitzgerald'due south book?
Below is a breakup of the ways in which the new film departs from the archetype novel.
The Frame Story
Luhrmann's chief departure from the novel arrives right at the first, with a frame story in which the narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), some time after that summer spent with Gatsby & co., has checked into a sanitarium, diagnosed by a md of some sort every bit "morbidly alcoholic." Fitzgerald's Nick does refer to Gatsby every bit "the man who gives his proper noun to this volume" (emphasis mine), then the idea that The Great Gatsby is a text written past Nick is not entirely original with Luhrmann—though the filmmaker takes this much further than Fitzgerald, showing Nick writing past hand, then typing, and finally compiling his finished manuscript. He fifty-fifty titles information technology, first justGatsby, and so adding, by hand, "The Great," in a concluding flourish. (Fitzgerald himself went through many more potential titles.) As for that morbid alcoholism, Nick claims in the novel that he's "been drunk just twice in my life," but the picture show slyly implies that he'south in denial, by showing him cantankerous out "in one case" for "twice," so, in the frame story, suggesting that information technology was far more than than that, actually.
Jordan and Nick
The plot of the movie is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out ane of the side stories: the affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy'due south from Louisville who is a well-known golfer. Daisy promises to set them upwardly, to button them "accidentally in linen closets and … out to sea in a boat," a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the motion-picture show, the matter is dropped. Luhrmann's Nick says he establish Hashemite kingdom of jordan "frightening" at commencement, a discussion Carraway doesn't apply to her in the novel—and later at Gatsby's we encounter Jordan whisked away from Nick past a male companion, which doesn't happen in the book. In the novel, they become a couple and suspension up about the stop of the summer.
The Apartment Party
The motion picture, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment'southward living room while the adulterous couple have loud sexual practice in the chamber. Fitzgerald doesn't spell out anything then explicit—but something like that is implied: Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear earlier the other guests arrive; Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle'southward sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a md in Queens; that's non in the novel at all. Luhrmann's Nick wakes upwardly at dwelling, half-dressed, unsure how he got at that place, while Fitzgerald's narrator comes to in an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle'southward place, owned past i of their friends (and party-guests); he so goes to Penn Station to take the four o'clock train habitation.
Lunch With Wolfsheim
In the volume, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a "well-fanned 42nd Street cellar," where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In the movie, Gatsby and Nick get to a barber store with a hidden entrance to a speakeasy, and one time inside they meet not but Wolfsheim only as well the constabulary commissioner—who, in the volume as in the film, Gatsby was "able to do … a favor one time." They also see at that place (if I understood things correctly) Nick'due south boss, whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom'due south friend Walter Chase. (In the novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.) The speakeasy features amusement from a bevy of Josephine Baker-similar dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.
Race
At least ane reviewer—David Denby again—has protested Luhmann's decision to cast an Indian player, Amitabh Bachchan, as Wolfsheim, a character based on notorious Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein. Simply faithfulness in this example probably would have meant anti-Semitism, since information technology is very difficult to defend Fitzgerald'south characterization of the "small, apartment-nosed Jew" with a "big caput" and "two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril." Casting Bachchan preserves the character'south otherness while complicating the rather gruesome stereotype Fitzgerald employed. Luhrmann appears to have given some idea to this, given that he faithfully keeps key passages from the novel about race: Tom's trumpeting of a racist book called Ascent of the Colored Empires (which had a real-world inspiration), Nick's glimpse of apparently wealthy black men and women being driven into Manhattan by a white chauffeur, and Tom'due south later diatribe nearly "intermarriage between black and white."
The Finnish Woman and Ella Kaye
Did you know that Nick Carraway had a maid? This is easy to forget, since Nick seems generally financially a bit strapped, certainly in comparison to his rich neighbors. Simply in the novel he employs "a Finnish woman who fabricated my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electrical stove." She makes a few appearances in the book but is understandably cut from the movie. So is Ella Kaye, the seemingly conniving woman who manages to snag the inheritance of Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who commencement prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody'south wealth goes to his family unit.
Gatsby's Death and Funeral
Near the end of the volume, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic married man of Tom's mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed her—and that, what'south more, he might accept been the i she was sleeping with on the side. Fitzgerald doesn't depict the murder: The volume says that Gatsby grabbed a "pneumatic mattress" (i.east., a floater) and headed to his pool, then Gatsby's chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, merely in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He'south so shot, and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and become way with him. None of that happens in the book.
Gatsby is, in both versions, alone in death, only the film is even crueler to him in this regard, dropping the last-minute advent of his begetter and the unexpected arrival at the funeral of a human being who Nick previously met in Gatsby's study. This is the aforementioned homo who famously points out that Gatsby has real books, just hasn't cut the pages. Nosotros encounter him in the pic in that study, only he makes no mention of the books, and his subsequent advent is dropped entirely.
Read more in Slate almost The Not bad Gatsby.
Previously
How True Is Pain & Gain?
How Accurate IsLincoln?
How Accurate IsArgo?
Who Are the People inZero Dark Thirty?
How Much Scientology Made It intoThe Master?
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/great-gatsby-movie-compared-to-the-book-how-faithful-is-it-to-f-scott-fitzgerald-s-novel-a-detailed-comparison.html
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