Great adaptation

Rating: 9/10 (18 May 2013)

This is a film that really captures the spirit of the source material. If Gatsby is a novel celebrated for above all else the way it's written, this movie is remarkable primarily for the way it's filmed. Like Fitzgerald's intoxicating prose, it's intense, lavish, and vibrant. The aesthetic of almost every shot embodies the glitz of 'the jazz age.' Clever use of music, digital effects and extravagant sets give you all the excitement of the mythical, roaring 20s while managing to avoid giving the impression of seeming 'old fashioned.'
The character of Jay Gatsby is somewhat like Shakespeare's Hamlet - people love to analyse the psychology, background and motivations of the character. There's plenty of mystery and ambiguity for critics to sink their teeth into. The movie intelligently portrays the character and plot, picking up on many of the subtle undertones and ambiguities, even suggesting something cohesive but resisting the temptation to boil it all down to a simple romantic love story. It also captures the overall light-hearted feel of the novel.
There are many details to relish here, like the aerial views of 1920s Manhattan, Carraway's narration (ie. Fitzgerald's prose) woven into the screenplay, beautiful costumes and vintage cars, the performance of the actor who played Tom Buchannan. Probably what I liked most was that many of the striking images from the original novel were preserved where they could so easily have been ignored/discarded - for instance the green light at the end of Daisy's peer, or the TJ Eckleberg billboard overlooking the TS Eliot-esque wasteland. It seems like the screenplay was prepared by someone who genuinely appreciated the novel.
My only real complaint about this film was that they omitted one of my all time favourite sentences from the closing statements of Carraway's narration. "He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."