Hum about The Great Gatsby!

I read The Great Gatsby penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, when I had taken the American novel writing in my literature course. And I had become a fan of Fitzgerald’s style and manner, which got me into reading most of his works and other writers of his time. Novels of 19^th century America may be considered at one level as social visionaries. American novels gained its inspiration from there contemporary British novels. The British novelists like Dickens, Disraeli wrote with a reformative zeal. On the other hand American novelists were not interested in reforming their society instead they put their moral energies in portraying the evils in their society. When they were bedeviled by moral issues in their social environment such as slavery, child labor and democratic equality.

Fitzgerald with Great Gatsby became the novelist of the great rebellion. In his writing there was a double sense of involvement and detachment which made him the immediate historian of an age, he was half living and half creating. The plot of Great Gatsby is that of the disillusion of an era following the world war I. The decade of 20’s was the gaudiest and the shortest. It has been brought out in contradictory terms as the “Golden age” and the “Hollow times” between the wars. The period had also been referred by various writers as the “Era of wonderful nonsense”, “The lawless decade”, “The passionate years “and the “Jazz age” a term coined by Fitzgerald himself. A novel with such a plot and a character Gatsby, who is sketched larger than life needs to be visualized and was thrilling to see Baz Luhrmann take this task to make the movie. Known for his lavish productions like Moulin Rouge-2001. The daunting task for Luhrmann was to adapt The Great Gatsby which mired in both its period source material and its earlier cinematic failures. In 1949,

Star Alan Ladd focused on Gatsby’s criminal connection and even took significant liberty to change the ending. 1974, a TV film starring Robert Redfort and Mia Farrow tried to relive the age and time but was slammed by critics as lifeless and lugubrious. The box office also had a score of US $20.6 million.

Baz Luhermann’s attempt on The Great Gatsby with stars like Leonard DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire was accorded the prestigious opening night slot at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15^{th 2013}. Due to budgetary restraint the Australian director shot the film in his native country rather than in New-York where the book had set its location. In the novel though Fitzgerald does not go below the surface but he has sketched the rattle and hull boo of that time with great gusto and sharp accuracy, let’s see how the audience takes it in the movie.