Review: "The Great Gatsby" (1974) only has value as a soporific
Movie of the Week #32
Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie, with writing of mine that’s never been published online before. This week, we’re celebrating a movie based on a book that turns 100 years old this month. Enjoy…
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be one of the Great American Novels, but it has produced, several times over, distinctly not-Great American Films, if ‘films’ they can even be called.
The 1974 production, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Robert Redford, is particularly contemptible. My overwhelming impression, suffering through this endurance challenge of a ‘movie,’ was a strong and irrepressible memory of rainy days in Elementary School; we would all have to go to the gymnasium instead of playing outside, and the teachers would turn on an assortment of awful videotapes, like the old BBC TV adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia. That’s the thing about the film versions of books one is made to watch in school; they have to be ‘appropriate,’ which is another way of saying they have to be devoid enough of style that they could not possibly leave a real impression, let alone offend. It felt wrong to be watching this Gatsby film as an adult, on my nice OLED TV via a Blu-ray disc, in the apartment I pay to live in of my own volition, rather than in a school building I was legally required to attend. This film does not make sense in any format other than VHS-tape-attached-to-a-barely-functioning-tube-TV-wheeled-into-the-classroom-on-a-rainy-day.
Clayton’s The Great Gatsby might be the single dullest movie I have ever seen. There is no passion to any of it. Not just in the completely heatless romance between Jay and Daisy, all of it shot, written, and acted like a bad perfume commercial whose commissioning client would demand the production costs back from the supposed filmmakers; neither is there passion to the friendships, the jealousy, the anger, or any of the other emotions found in Fitzgerald’s enduringly rich text. It is a cheap TV movie dressed up in the skin suit of Hollywood glamor, which just makes the lack of formal substance all the more insulting.
The first and greatest stumbling block to every Great Gatsby adaptation is the narration. As soon as one makes an actor read the book to us atop images illustrating those words, one is no longer making a movie, but an illustrated audiobook, the words of a long-dead author controlling the camera like a ventriloquist manipulates a puppet. The actor playing Nick Carraway – in this case the great Sam Waterston – always suffers, because they are not allowed to play a character, but to serve as a physical embodiment of the text. Fitzgerald’s beautiful words do not propel the performance, but smothers it, drowning out the actor’s ability to illustrate interiority with the normal tools of screen acting; the words are doing it instead, in the fashion of a novel, not of a film. And of course, the narration eventually disappears for long stretches anyway, because unless one is working in a genre or style that is built to allow and make active use of narration – such as the film noir, whose focus on introspection, memory, and interiority lends itself to a natural, dynamic contrast of voice and image – one simply cannot support the textual device for the full length of a feature. It only ever stays around long enough to prove a distraction.
The moment in this Gatsby that crystallizes the problem comes when we first see the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking over the valley of ashes. It’s a fine image, a decent cinematic evocation of Fitzgerald’s words. But it isn’t an evocation – because Nick is talking over the scene, describing the space to us; the image is made wholly subordinate, and therefore secondary. It feels like part of a high school lesson, an aid for teaching the text, not a movie trying its best to express itself through the tools of the medium. A good rule of thumb for adaptation is asking whether or not one would make the film this way if one were telling a wholly original story, with no text demanding fealty. Were there no Fitzgerald book, and you were a filmmaker in 1974 having been struck with the coincidental inspiration to tell the same story, would you have this shot accompanied by narration? Any narration, not just this narration? Or would you trust the audience to see the desolation of the valley of ashes, and sense with their eyes the frank symbolism evident in the faded eyes of Dr. Eckelburg’s neglected billboard? Were you building this film from the ground up, what would be missing in that scene that narration is needed to fill in?
Nick himself is a stumbling block to Gatsby adaptations too. Because his principle role in the form of the novel is as a narrator, as our eyes and ears on the action, filmmakers routinely miss that he is also a significant player within that action, one with genuine personality and agency. Here, Clayton adapts the form of Nick Carraway – the person bearing witness and then describing what he sees – without ever once adapting the character of Nick Carraway. Doing so would not be impossible; Fitzgerald leaves plenty of bits of voice and personality for the attentive reader to reconstruct into an active cinematic character, one who could inhabit the space, rather than just observe it. But observe is all Sam Waterston is allowed to do here. There is no personality, no voice; he just stands around and watches the action. We watch him do the watching, an unnecessary interlocutor in a medium where the camera has already taken care of that for us.
There are so many great names involved in this adaptation, names you will definitely know. Actors like Waterston and Redford, or Mia Farrow, Karen Black, and Bruce Dern. A screenplay credited to Francis Ford Coppola. The extraordinary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who shot no less a movie than Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nelson Riddle on the score, a musician whose film and TV credits are legion, yet still ancillary in his legacy to his work as arranger and conductor for artists like Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, and Linda Ronstadt.
One name you definitely haven’t heard is that of the director, Jack Clayton, and there is an immediately obvious reason for that: the film is horrifically poorly directed, in a way that brutally suppresses the natural and prodigious talents of all involved, and illustrates, through its complete absence, the necessity of good direction.
Clayton’s filmmaking is excessively obvious, never capable of emphasizing more than one emotion or idea at a time. It has to focus the whole of our attention in on one point in every instance. See the early scene where Myrtle Wilson (Black) delivers an interminably long whisper monologue (were ASMR a phenomenon in 1974, one would assume Clayton directed his actors to perform as though they were making such a video), and Clayton drowns out all other sound while pushing the camera in closer and closer, the film refusing to allow anything but the words to come to the fore. Or the moment later on when Nick and Gatsby are preparing for Daisy’s visit, and Gatsby’s dialogue is interrupted by the butler bringing in gleaming silverware. We know it’s gleaming because the whole film literally stops – Gatsby goes silent, along with every other ambient noise – so we can zoom in to a full-frame close-up of the silver goblets and plates, the camera lens paired with an ugly gaussian filter to diffuse the light out in the most garish way imaginable, so that light bounces and reflects off every inch of every surface. Only once we have spent several moments surveying the sparkles, understanding to the core of our beings that these goblets are, in fact, fancy, is the film allowed to cut back to Gatsby, and let Robert Redford finish his line.
This use of honest-to-god zoom-ins is a regular part of the film’s vocabulary, and illustrates why they are so rarely used by narrative filmmakers. Unless you are a truly great and singular auteur who has fashioned an entire aesthetic around them – a la Robert Altman or Hong Sangsoo – it feels like a crutch, a crude way to underline, to quite literally shove our nose in the place in the image to which we are meant to pay attention. Altman, of course, was also famous for dense soundtracks with overlapping, criss-crossing webs of dialogue. Clayton’s soundtrack is sparse, excessively univocal; as in the image, only one thing can happen at a time, and voices can never be in conflict with each other, let alone the visuals. Altman gets away with zooms in no small part because he favors aural cacophony, and packs his images with dense and lively mise-en-scene, such that his zooms feel like rather subtle focusing devices; a friend tapping you on the shoulder in the middle of a crowded room and pointing towards something interesting. Clayton’s zooms are more akin to standing in an empty and soundproof room, being shoved violently towards the one point of interest on display.
The sequences depicting Gatsby’s raucous parties are perhaps the biggest distinction between this film and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, which has many problems of its own but at least excels in this one area, as the Moulin Rouge! side of Luhrmann comes out in full, welcome force. Yet the party scenes in the 1974 film don’t just suffer in that comparison; they also pale distinctly to the novel itself, which uses intense language and long, florid descriptions to give a sense of overwhelm, of volume, of excess. Fitzgerald’s words make it clear that whatever you are imagining of a rich man’s fabulous parties, you are not imagining enough; this is why strangers flock from around New York to attend gatherings hosted by a man they have never met.
None of that is successfully translated to Clayton’s film, nor is an honest attempt even made. These parties are stuffy, quiet, and mostly polite; a viewer who had never read Fitzgerald’s novel would have no sense at all that these are supposed to be massively disruptive social events well outside the ordinary. Maybe what the film presents is aesthetically accurate, in costuming and production design, to parties of the period; I don’t know. But I have read the book, and I can definitely say that nothing we see here comes close to evoking through the language of cinema the sensations that Fitzgerald describes through the form of the novel – which is, of course, what really matters. However one does it, the filmmaker has to communicate to the viewer the narrative and thematic sensibility that Fitzgerald gives the reader: that these parties are in some way extraordinary, that they are giant attention-grabbing affairs Gatsby mounts for the dual purposes of A) attracting Daisy from across the bay, and B) distracting himself from the interminable boredom and restlessness that he feels having nominally achieved the illusive ‘American Dream.’ Remember that Jay Gatsby is a self-conscious creation; it’s not even his name. This is a character he constructed as an adolescent vision of what it meant to be rich and successful in America, and his parties are meant to be an extension of that: an ostentatious display of wealth and excess that is hyper-real, that goes a bit beyond what actual wealth and privilege looks like, the same way Gatsby, although having genuinely attained great wealth, still feels ‘off’ in some fundamental way, because he is pretending to ‘belong’ to a class whose true price of entry is by dint of birth. All of that is missing here, lost in the failure to leverage mise-en-scene with the same ferocity that Fitzgerald leverages the written word.
The performances are terrible, almost astonishingly so. There is a very limited band of expression the director allows his actors here; everything and everyone is so stiff and narrow, so bound by the language and sequencing of the novel, that even the blocking feeling limited by the bounds of the words. It is more accurate to say they are each reading an audiobook while wearing costumes than they are giving actual cinematic performances.
Redford perhaps fares better than the others because he’s Robert Redford, and you can only suppress his charisma and screen presence so much. But it is suppressed. This Gatsby does not feel ‘Great,’ but small. Everyone here is part of the scenery, a subordinate illustration of the novel’s language, not a carefully considered actorly illustration of the part itself. The performances are made so dry and mechanical that they feel like an uncanny mirror-world version of Robert Bresson’s ‘models.’ That technique involved casting non-professional actors and shooting countless takes until the dialogue and actions came out like second nature, so rote and automatic that they conjured a paradoxical spontaneity. Bresson said he wanted his ‘models’ to move from the ‘exterior to the interior,’ rather than the other way around; it is another way of saying his performances feel evocatively unconscious. Clayton’s ‘technique’ with his actors here – if any real philosophy of acting is being employed – feels like it goes a step beyond, to where every actor is completely deadened inside. There is no spontaneity, paradoxical or otherwise; you can instead see the cogs turning within each performer’s head at all times, a constant roiling calculation of how to suppress the natural charisma that got them all this far in the first place. Every person on screen seems palpably uncomfortable.
Here is the ultimate test of any adaptation, especially one of a celebrated, culturally ubiquitous work like The Great Gatsby: If you showed this film to a person who had, somehow, never heard of the book – had no familiarity with it at all, no sense of its reputation or stature – and then, as the credits rolled, informed this person of the incalculable book’s incalculable literary and cultural impact, would that revelation make sense to them? Would they understand any part of why this work was important in the first place from watching the adaptation? Or would they be deeply confused? You’re telling me THAT’S the book we make every High School student in America read? Why on Earth would we do that to them? I thought corporeal punishment was no longer allowed in public education.
Obviously, I think the answer here is a full-throated no. This hypothetical person would be quite baffled, for despite hewing slavishly to the book, the experience of watching this Gatsby on film is infinitely closer to stumbling upon an old, forgotten TV movie-of-the-week than it is to reading F. Scott Fitzgerald – even when all the movie is doing is reading Fitzgerald to you.
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