The Great Gatsby Comparison

“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can” ~Jay Gatsby
The latest version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann, uses many of F Scott Fitzgerald’s original descriptions and dialogue. It respects the fact that the book is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, cousin of Daisy, the woman who Gatsby loves. It carefully reproduces various details, such as the clock Gatsby drops when meeting Daisy again for the first time since she married Tom Buchanan five years earlier. It follows Fitzgerald’s instructions that Tom’s lover’s husband’s garage is beside the “valley of ashes” and a huge optician’s billboard portraying the eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg. It accurately presents everything that Fitzgerald describes, using the
technology generation as a substitute for imagination. Nick Carraway, some time after that summer spent with Gatsby, had checked into a sanitarium, diagnosed by a doctor as “morbidly alcoholic.” Fitzgerald’s Nick does refer to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this book”, so the idea that The Great Gatsby is a text written by Nick is not entirely original with Luhrmann though the filmmaker takes this much further than Fitzgerald, showing Nick writing by hand, then typing, and finally compiling his finished manuscript.
He even titles it first just Gatsby then adding by hand, “The Great”. As for that morbid alcoholism, Nick claims in the novel that he’s “been drunk just twice in my
life,”

but the movie slyly implies that he’s in denial, by showing him cross out “once” for “twice,” and then in the story suggesting that it was far more than that. The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the book, but one of the side stories was cut out. The affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy’s from Louisville who is a well known golfer. Daisy promises to set them up, to push them “accidentally in linen closets and out to sea in a boat”. Nick says he found Jordan “frightening” at first, a word Nick doesn’t apply to her in the book and later at a party we see Jordan whisked away from Nick by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the book, they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer. The movie, like the book, is a series of set pieces, including a party that Tom throws in a apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson.
Nick accompanies them, and the movie shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the couple have loud intercourse in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit but something like that is implied. Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive while Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens, that’s not in the book at all. Nick later wakes up at home, half-dressed, and unsure how he got there, while in the book, Nick comes to an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle’s place, owned by one of their friends then he goes to Penn Station to take a train
home. Nick Carraway also had a maid, he employed “a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.”, she made a few appearances in the book but was cut from the movie. Ella Kaye was also cut from the movie, the conniving woman who manages to snag the inheritance of Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who first prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody’s wealth goes to his family. Near the end of the book, Gatsby is killed by George Wilson, the husband of Tom’s mistress, who thinks that Gatsby killed her and that he might have been the one she was having an affair with. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder. The book says that Gatsby grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” and headed to his pool, then Gatsby’s butler hears gunshots. Luhrmann ditches the “pneumatic mattress” and adds his own dramatic twist. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the movie, Nick calls and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He’s then shot and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and go way with him. None of that happens in the book. Gatsby is, in both the movie and book, lonely in death, but the movie is even crueler to him than the book, dropping the last minute appearance of his father and the arrival at the funeral of a man who Nick previously met in Gatsby’s study. This is the same man who points out that Gatsby has real books, but hasn’t cut the pages. We meet him in that study, but he makes no mention of the books, and his appearance is dropped entirely. Perhaps the oddest thing about the movie is that it makes so little of the other subject of the book, America itself. It aspires to make a great American movie of a great American book, but does not locate itself observantly in the culture that fascinated and appalled Fitzgerald. In the end, this is just a movie about rich people behaving unpleasantly.

Works Cited
Berlastky, Noah. "The Great Gatsby Movie Needed to Be More Gay." The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 13 May 2013. Web. May 2013. .
Brody, Richard. "“The Great Gatsby”: Try Again, Old Sport." The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 10 May 2013. Web. May 2013 .
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.
Moore, Charles. "Baz Luhrmann 's The Great Gatsby." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited , 19 May 2013. Web. May 2013. .