F. Scott Would've Been Proud

Rating: Null/10 (12 May 2013)

I'm betting many of the COMMENTers herein as well as the Rotten-Tomato critics didn't read the book nor know much about the American Roaring '20's and/or the nature of FSF's popularity therein. It seems to me that many of those that didn't like this new film version of THE GREAT GATSBY fail to consider that maybe they don't like FSF's sentiments. point-of-view, etc., in the first place. In other words, this film may very successfully capture a book, an era and a writer that some viewers simply hold in disdain. In such case, why blame the movie?
I concede that the party scenes are over the top. The idea was to display the abandon, recklessness and greed overtaking a new class of Americans at that time. FSF was a proponent of such people. His critics, myself included, argue that he was a sycophant to such folk, displaying a puppy-dog loyalty to their whims and anxieties and mistakenly trying to distinguish their petty domestic squabbles as classical tragedy instead of the mundane human failures they actually were.
But FSF wrote so beautifully and whether or not his concerns were misplaced his passion can neither be denied nor unappreciated. He did so by writing simply yet eloquently. Above all he relied on description and evocation of mood, with -unlike Hemingway and other contemporaries- using a bare minimum of dialog. In such case he poetically and beautifully paints an era and it's longings even if he thought he was doing something else.
This new version of TGG does a fine job of doing what FSF attempted to do. Indeed, the characters say relatively little regarding their actual desires and absolutely nothing regarding their times, their excesses, etc. That the wild parties, NYC landscapes and non-major cast is done in almost-cartoon fashion seems fitting, as it isolates the main characters and their cloistered lives. F. Scot and Zelda would have loved to see this move almost as much as they'd like partying at the Oscars.