The Brilliance of The Great Gatsby

The critics have not been kind but they are wrong. The Great Gatsby shimmers on the screen. The film does what Fitzgerald did; it takes us in the eye of the metaphor and jumps into it and then does what any art does...exaggerates. Take the green light. Perfect. Of course we build around that visionary beam of the American Dream. It is nothing less than Gatsby's soul and in the movie the green light beams and beams like a laser strobe across the bay from Daisy's dock. It is the coalescence of the Fitzgerald novel...the magnet that catches all the metal filings. And we open and close with that green vision of hope... but lets move on.

The flowing billowy curtains that takes Fitzgerald's prose and puts it into form. The eloquence of that metaphor is the women and the room are all floating around the ceiling and when Tom Buchanan shuts the door he shuts it all down and everyone floats back down...the effortless ether of the rich against the hard malice of Tom. And then of course the parties that seem to bother everyone. Have you never partied? Maureen Dowd of NY Times and others just couldn't get around the fact that these parties were over the top  and fantastical. Did we ever live through the first twentieth century boom before income tax? During prohibition? And of course the original prose was over the top. When Fitzgerald describes the party it is the top of the top doing what they do best.

And then of course the driving. The crazy driving and Gatsby's car which is described as a leather conservatory in the novel and an amazing yellow car nickel plated and swollen with hat boxes and fenders and curves and so we create Gatsby's car and the way he drives and the way everyone drives in the roaring twenties. And could the party in Toms apartment been any more than the drunken bacchanal of sex, jazz,  and booze that was the twenties?  And then we go on to the showdown at the Plaza and Gatsby cracking up against Toms hard malice. And what is amazing is the film stayed on Fitzgerald's metaphors and prose giving way to the book by putting the actual words on the screen and yes the use of Nick Caraway as the writer might have bothered some but it did anchor us in time and yes the relationship between Nick and Jordan Baker was lost but a small point for finally taking on the  love story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy and giving the story its markers as the last will and testament to the American Dream.

I was all set to hate this film. In fact I never believed the novel could be brought to life on the screen but the movie brought to life the story and tipped its hat to the prose all along the way. The brilliance of the movie is that it made brilliant Fitzgerald's prose....a film of metaphors and for someone to pull that off in the year 2013 and bring high brow entertainment to the masses...I'll drink a highball to that any day and say with Jay Gatsby in his pink suit...
Cant repeat the past!...of course you can old sport!

Rocket Man...the upside down American Dream

Why Gatsby Will Always Elude Film

We all saw Coppola's effort to capture The Great Gatsby with Redford and Mia Farrow mooning after each other in seventies grandeur. Great clothing. Great cars. Great music. Terrible movie. And yet here was Fitzgerald's masterpiece, but of course Coppola's problem was he was too in love with the novel. He tried to interject Fitzgerald's prose wherever he could and it was like laying silk on charcoal. "Cant repeat the past, of course you can old sport!' Redford choked on that one.

And if the characters didn't choke on the prose then the narrator did. "I have been turning over some advice my father gave me once...." The stertorous Nick Caraway years before he was a TD Waterhouse mouthpiece just couldn't handle those lines without dropping them like lead into the Long Island Sound. And why shouldn't he? Voice overs are tricky anyway and literary voice overs feel like syrup dribbled all over perfectly good scenes. Scream when the metaphors become too much.

But metaphor was Fitzgerald's gift and that elegiac elegant prose does not translate to the eye or the ear. It was meant to be read. Sadly for DiCaprio and everyone else involved in the new attempt to bring Gatsby to the twenty first century they will only succeed in sending people to find the book. And even if they update the story will not translate. The intelligence of Fitzgerald and any first rate novelist is they understand the keening of a read line of prose and its impress on human consciousness. No amount of CG will ever bail out a visual medium in this area.

And so we will be left with the plot without the fine linen. And so, we will beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaseless to the novel. And not the film.

Rocket Man...The American dream turned upside down
 

Missing the Longest Day of the Year

Summer is fast. So fast that the longest day of the year has come and gone. Now we start a steady march to the short days of winter. June 21st is the Summer Solstice and I wish I had marked the day with some sort of reminder that life is what John Lennon said "the things we do between what we are planning to do." Or as a poet once put it" the way we miss our life is our life." Sad but true. And now we must grabs these summer days before the shortening twilight comes down on our summer hiatus.

"I always miss the longest day of the summer," Daisy Buchannan said in The Great Gatsby. "It always makes me sad that I miss the longest day." Her melancholy of course presages the life she is incapable of enjoying. We can relate. Twittering and surfing and glued to computer screens while the hot days of summer play outside our window we are incapable of enjoying the best days of the year. Children know. They know that when school ends there should be a respite, there should be the promised months of slow days. The agrarian cycle is the reason we give them off for the summer and we remember our own youth in those long days of lassitude.

But even children now suffer from our wired hyperactivity. Scheduled to the drum beat of camps and sports and any other thing overworked and stressed parents can come up with to keep their children occupied--there is little of the summer days that Scout and Jem enjoyed in To Kill A Mockingbird. Summer was a time to do nothing. Boredom is the luxury of children in summer and mostly we find those moments in literature now. Member of the Wedding, Mockingbird, Tobacco Sticks, these children drowse away their days in the slowed time of little to do.

Unfortunately those summers do belong to literature now. Children are wired the same way we are and those moments of slowed time belong to a day when the personal moment existed far away from some cyber reality. The best we can do now is try and catch a moment of summer and remember those slow days and maybe slow down ourselves.

Maybe in the end summer belongs to our youth--when the longest day of the year was still within our reach.