Interesting but frustrating

Rating: 6/10 (3 April 2015)

I haven't read Gatsby in years, but my reaction at the end felt familiar. Despite Nick's love, this isn't the tragedy of a man who is better than everyone, destroyed by a cruel and uncaring world. Gatsby sacrifices his life to protect his love. He accomplishes everything he wants, except her divorce and remarriage. Despite being a criminal and a fraud, Gatsby enjoys his affair, wealth, and fame. Unreasonable Gatsby does better with his (married) girlfriend than he has any right to expect. He dies successfully protecting Daisy, believing he won the game, once again thanks to good old Nick.
It was very odd to hear such *modern* music by black musicians, alternating with Tom ranting about the necessity of keeping the 'inferior' black population suppressed in front of his small army of black servants. As a friend pointed out, there is a huge amount of great Jazz Age music that would have worked perfectly, so there was no need to bring us out of the period that way.
The first third was all about huge dance numbers and set pieces, which was fun but felt a bit orthogonal to the plot. Clearly Baz is one of the many people more into ambiance than I...
Before I even saw the movie I was wondering why Baz was effacing Fitzgerald as the creator of this story. At the end the story is credited to Nick and the credits talk about Baz, but there's nothing about Fitzgerald. Could the creator of such a huge and successful piece really be that insecure?