What Are The Differences In The Great Gatsby

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but few pictures can so naturally capture the unique subtleties intrinsic to literature. Such is the main dilemma in the translation between the two mediums of expression, and the challenge of all directors satisfying both their author and audience. Turning words on a page into angles, actors, and images, the language of all film, challenges filmmakers to balance story, style, and ambition to at once maintain familiarity and quality for their audience. Inventing new material can risk leaving an audience confused and unfamiliar with the subject, while literally translating the material risks becoming forgettable and ridden with flaws in pace and affection; literary descriptions can be either incredibly more subtle or pronounced than what their length or position would at first suggest.
Failed literary adaptations that are faithful are all undone and humiliated by the obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature, while all good adaptations succeed through hubris in some manner by acknowledging that source material is not scripture, but rather a block of material to be shaped by the director’s imagination.
Fitzgerald’s timeless, celebrated American classic, The Great Gatsby, is notably grist for endless interpretation, and director Baz Luhrmann takes full advantage of this to provide his own distinct, modern material in his 2013 film adaptation of the same name. While Luhrmann maintains reverence for the classic’s source material, his amplified, vivacious rendering of Gatsby’s tragedy results in a lavishly theatrical, ostentatious celebration of the emotional and material extravagance devoid of the subtle and tender themes Fitzgerald composed with such fascinated
ambivalence.