The "So-So" Gatsby

Rating: 7/10 (20 May 2013)

There is a lot that happens in this movie before Buchanan and Gatsby ever meet up. I found a lot of this boring. Some of the scenes that take place in this 1920's New York setting were interesting. Some of them were definitely full of eye candy (thanks Luhrmann). Gatsby throws many parties. Gatsby is not usually visible at his parties at first. When Carraway first gets an invitation he tries to find him and many people at the party say, "you don't ever see Gatsby." But later in the film, he's at many parties and people know him so this was kind of odd, especially since it was a 10 min. charade early in the film making a point of how anonymous he was. We see many parties that take place at Gatsby's house and eventually learn, they are all for Daisy. His house is near hers, and it was his hope that once he made something of himself and made enough money, she would stumble upon him and find him worthy and that she can't live without him.
Jay and Daisy do eventually reunite, and this is when the movie gets good for a bit. The soundtrack gets kind of eerie and the tragic foreshadowing makes you wonder if and when this rekindled romance will end. The relationship between Gatsby and Mr. Buchanan gets tense and caused me to wonder when these two men would throw down and fight for Daisy's heart. Unfortunately this doesn't happen. I'm not sure how true the movie is to the novel, or if the ending is the same, but I did not like the road the film traveled down once Tom Buchanan knows that Jay Gatsby loves his wife.
There were a couple of things that bothered me in this film. Since Carraway is in a mental institution, he probably had something pretty severe happen to him, and after watching the entire movie I'm not sure why he actually went crazy. Another thing that I didn't buy into was that Carraway said multiple times in the movie that Gatsby was one of the most hopeful men he's ever met, and will probably ever meet. While I would pencil Gatsby in as an optimistic I didn't see the hope that he was talking about, to me it was more obsessiveness. He didn't have a positive outlook on all things, he more just believed that no matter what, he and Daisy would be together and be okay. I would classify someone full of hope as optimistic or a glass half full type of person, and Gatsby didn't seem like he was that necessarily, he just obsessively gripped the notion that he and Daisy would be happy together, yet Carraway said he had the most hope of anyone he'd ever met. Strange.
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