This presentations is about the difference in the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' by Baz Luhrmann

1. How Faithful Is The Great Gatsby?
BY DAVID HAGLUND
Haglund, David. "How Faithful Is The Great Gatsby?" 09 May 2013. The Slate Group LLC. 08
March 2022. <https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/great-gatsby-movie-compared-to-the-book-
how-faithful-is-it-to-f-scott-fitzgerald-s-novel-a-detailed-comparison.html>.

2. •Fitzgerald’s novel, while great, is not, for the
most part, terribly subtle. And though it has
moments of real tenderness, it also has
melodrama, murder, adultery, and, of course,
wild parties. In any case, we can put aside, for
the moment, the larger question of whether
Luhrmann captured the spirit of Gatsby, which is
very much open for debate.
•There’s a simpler question to address first: How
faithful was the filmmaker to the letter of
Fitzgerald’s book?

3. The Frame Story
• Luhrmann’s chief departure from the novel arrives right at the beginning, with a
frame story in which the narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), some time
after that summer spent with Gatsby & co., has checked into a sanitarium,
diagnosed by a doctor of some sort as “morbidly alcoholic.” Fitzgerald’s Nick
does refer to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this book” (emphasis
mine), 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,” in a concluding flourish. (Fitzgerald himself went through
many more potential titles.) 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 frame story, suggesting that it was far more than that, really.

4. Jordan and Nick
• The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but
Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out one of the
side stories: 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,” a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the film, the
matter is dropped. Luhrmann’s Nick says he found Jordan
“frightening” at first, a word Carraway doesn’t apply to her in the
novel—and later at Gatsby’s we see Jordan whisked away from Nick
by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the novel,
they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer.

5. The Apartment Party
• The film, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party
that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle
Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film
shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the adulterous
couple have loud sex 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; 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 novel at all. Luhrmann’s Nick
wakes up at home, half-dressed, unsure how he got there, while Fitzgerald’s
narrator comes to in an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle’s place,
owned by one of their friends (and party-guests); he then goes to Penn Station
to take the 4 o’clock train home.

6. Lunch With Wolfsheim
• In the book, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a “well-fanned 42nd Street cellar,”
where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In
the movie, Gatsby and Nick go to a barber shop with a hidden entrance to a
speakeasy, and once inside they see not only Wolfsheim but also the police
commissioner—who, in the book as in the film, Gatsby was “able to do … a
favor once.” They also see there (if I understood things correctly) Nick’s boss,
whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom’s friend Walter Chase. (In the
novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.)
The speakeasy features entertainment from a bevy of Josephine Baker-like
dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.

7. Racism
• At least one reviewer—David Denby again—has protested Luhmann’s
decision to cast an Indian actor, Amitabh Bachchan, as Wolfsheim, a character
based on notorious Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein. But faithfulness in this
case probably would have meant anti-Semitism, since it is very hard to defend
Fitzgerald’s characterization of the “small, flat-nosed Jew” with a “large head”
and “two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.” Casting
Bachchan preserves the character’s otherness while complicating the rather
gruesome stereotype Fitzgerald employed. Luhrmann appears to have given
some thought to this, given that he faithfully keeps key passages from the
novel about race: Tom’s trumpeting of a racist book called Rise of the Colored
Empires (which had a real-world inspiration), Nick’s glimpse of apparently
wealthy black men and women being driven into Manhattan by a white
chauffeur, and Tom’s later diatribe about “intermarriage between black and
white.”

8. The Finnish Woman and Ella Kaye
• Did you know that Nick Carraway had a maid? This is easy to
forget, since Nick seems generally financially a bit strapped,
certainly in comparison to his rich neighbors. But in the novel
he employs “a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the
electric stove.” She makes a few appearances in the book but
is understandably cut from the movie. So is Ella Kaye, the
seemingly 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.

9. Gatsby’s Death and Funeral
• Near the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic
husband of Tom’s mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed
her—and that, what’s more, he might have been the one she was sleeping with
on the side. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder: The book says that Gatsby
grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” (i.e., a floater) and headed to his pool, then
Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress
and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting
for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, 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. . . . Cont . . .

10. • Gatsby is, in both versions, lonely in death, but
the film is even crueler to him in this regard,
dropping the last-minute appearance of his father
and the unexpected arrival at the funeral of a man
who Nick previously met in Gatsby’s study. This is
the same man who famously points out that
Gatsby has real books, but hasn’t cut the pages.
We meet him in the movie in that study, but he
makes no mention of the books, and his
subsequent appearance is dropped entirely.