Comparing The Great Gatsby And Baz Luhrmann's

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps the most iconic literary representation of the roaring 1920s of America in existence. Its perennial appearance in high school English class curricula signifies its lasting desirability, making the succinct novel difficult to translate to the big screen. Nonetheless, in the decades succeeding the novel’s release, several adaptations to screen have emerged; the most recent is the 2013 interpretation by director Baz Luhrmann. While the film contains all of the gaudy outrageousness of the book, the very personality of the title character is lost in translation: the Gatsby of Fitzgerald’s pen morphs into a sinister force on screen, making the adaptation an ineffective and dishonest reinvention of the novel. Differences in Gatsby’s behavior and language most prominently reveal the dissimilarity between Luhrmann’s Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s. For instance, integral to Gatsby’s personality is …show more content…
The latter critic laments that in the film, Gatsby’s magnetism is the product of his “vast reserve of expensive toys,” rather than “the lessons of his home-schooled charm,” an accusation supported by the many lavish props exhibited throughout the film, from an eccentric orange juice maker to his iconic automobile, made an exuberant yellow in the film. Rothman, in contrast, draws on Gatsby’s easy open-mindedness as the explanation for his appeal—a stance much more prevalent in the book than in the film, where Gatsby shuts down Daisy’s fantasy of running away together with the line “…Daisy, that wouldn’t be respectable” (Luhrmann). That line also undermines the novel’s presentation of Gatsby as a man who gave up unimaginable wonders in favor of romancing Daisy, instead