The Confidence Index: Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY
The Confidence Index….in which we assess the chance that an upcoming adaptation of a novel/book/short story/comic will not suck. A score of 10 means we are expecting THE GODFATHER. A score of 1 means…well, did you see Catwoman?
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Hearing that one of your favorite books is being adapted for a movie is bittersweet news. Part of you is thrilled that you’ll have a “new” version of this book you love in your life, but part of you also dreads what might happen. For every Lord of the Rings, there is a The Bonfire of the Vanities, a The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and a live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Chances are, your beloved book is going to get butchered.
Next on the chopping block….deep breath….The Great Gatsby, a novel that is for literary fiction nuts our One Ring, the thing we guard, covet, fixate on, and live for (even sometimes to our detriment). It has already been adapted into a moribund, though pretty, movie with just about the perfect Gatsby (Redford) one could hope for.
And now, Baz Luhrmann has thrown his flat cap into the ring. Just how worried should we be?
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Source Material
The major difficulty with adapting Gatsby (and many other novels) is that masterful prose doesn’t translate well to the screen, and this is the very thing that makes it an all-timer. Seriously, tell me what you do with something like this:This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.Sure, you could film a scene that looks like this, but this is about rhythm as much as it is about imagery. You also can’t capture Fitzgerald’s evocative temporal descriptors like “occasionally” in a movie. If we get a scene of the valley of ashes, we will get it once and it will either have a line of gray cars crawling or it won’t. And that, times a hundred, is the difference between a book and a movie.