Can new film, The Great Gatsby, live up to the classic novel?

The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece

Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, opens in the UK this week.  Dr Yannis Tzioumakis, from the University’s Department of Communication and Media, and Dr Chris Routledge, from the Centre for Lifelong Learning, give their view on how the novel and film compare for 21^st century audiences.

Dr Routledge said: “Set in 1922, around the time that the ‘roaring twenties’ really began, The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated of all American novels and widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

“It helped create our view of what the 1920s were like in the United States–flappers, parties, jazz, and prohibition–but it also contains a darker truth of bootleggers and organized crime.

Boom built on moral failure

“Fitzgerald understood that a boom built on moral failure and greed would eventually play out as bust. The novel anticipates the conditions that led to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

“The Great Gatsby lends itself to the kind of shiny lavishness for which Baz Luhrman has become famous as a director.  Yet what the novel does perhaps better than any other dramatisation of the lives of the very rich is expose the shallowness of their opulent public personas. It is a novel full of fakery and falsehood, and in that respect is part of an American tradition going back almost two hundred years.

Dr Tzioumakis added: “Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann has a history of taking literary and other properties set in particular eras and ‘updating’ them, following the commercial and critical success of his films: William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge.

“Although purists have often been offended, especially by Luhrmann’s Shakespeare adaptation, both films quickly established themselves as important texts in the postmodernism infused, increasingly globalised culture of the last 20 years.

“These two films are characterised by an interesting blend of styles that includes an extensive use of a number of eclectic and anachronistic elements, especially music and songs that gives a modern twist to the original material. In the process this helps the films connect with a younger and hipper audience that would not necessarily run to the theatres to see such ‘literary’ films.

Score written by Jay-Z

“In The Great Gatsby Luhrmann seems to be following a similar formula, to his two previous commercial and critical success films – William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge.

“Although the narrative is taking place in the 1920s, the age of jazz, Charleston and flappers, Luhrmann is using a score written primarily by hip-hop superstar Jay Z and featuring songs by contemporary artists and bands, including U2, Florence + the Machine, Beyonce and Roxy Music, alongside music by, among others, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong.

”But arguably the bigger gamble with the film is that it was produced and will be released in 3D, making for a very interesting experiment, the first adaptation of a major literary work to come out in this format. While 3D is becoming the industry norm for expensive action adventure blockbuster and animation films, it is pretty much uncharted territory for ‘serious’ dramas, especially ones based on literary powerhouses like The Great Gatsby.

“As much as this might offend the purists and perhaps turn off the lovers of the novel, the new Gatsby adaptation shows that Hollywood is willing to invest hundreds of millions in the adaptation of great literature, provided that it is made for a wide market of primarily young audiences and not just for the niche market of literature lovers, which tends to be served by the independent film sector.”