thoughts on The Great Gatsby

I'll preface this review with this: I know that The Great Gatsby is considered a classic, and I personally know at least a couple of people who consider it one of their favorite books. I personally only read it for the first time about three years ago, and I thought it was just okay. The book is told from the perspective of an outsider, Nick Carraway, and to some extent I understand why that was necessary; the author is trying to build up suspense around the Gatsby character, and it's useful to see the lifestyle depicted from the perspective of someone who, like the audience, is not really part of it. However, the problems with this are that Nick himself is not a particularly compelling character; you don't get to see the Gatsby and Daisy relationship from the perspective of the two people in it, which makes it difficult to care about it as much as we need to for the story to work; and I actually found what was eventually revealed about Gatsby to be fairly anticlimactic.

The movie has the same basic problems, plus the added nonsense that the whole thing is told in flashback by Nick while he is institutionalized, telling his story to the doctor, and eventually writing what will supposedly become The Great Gatsby. It is visually stunning; Baz Luhrmann does a great job with the party scenes, especially, which are decadent and over the top and, well...awesome. He's doing what he does best there. However, I still didn't care all that much about the characters, and-- okay, so I hate Tobey Maguire so much that one of the first comments I made to my friends after the movie was, "I hate Tobey Maguire's stupid face." Later, at dinner, long after we had moved on to other topics of conversation, I continued, "I hate Tobey Maguire's face so much that it's, like, offensive to me that people keep putting him in movies." Basically, the takeaway there is, I didn't care for the character that much in the book, and having him played by an actor I hate did not help one bit. I also-- and yes, I realize I'm nitpicking here-- did not care for Leonardo's speaking voice in this movie.

What it comes down to, I think, is this. Also after the movie, I commented to my friends, "For a movie that included murder, adultery, and that many parties...it was awfully boring." You can have characters doing any number of "exciting" things, but if you don't care about the characters, it's still not going to be interesting. There were aspects of it I liked. I didn't like it overall.