Review by Pamela
Zoslov
The news that
Australian director Baz Luhrmann was making yet another adaptation of F.
Scott Fitzgerald's
THE GREAT GATSBY raised a familiar dread.
What would the tasteless showman responsible for
MOULIN ROUGE
do to Fitzgerald's slender, elegiac Jazz Age novel? The trailer for
the film, a high-decibel mash-up featuring a robotic version of that
well known 1920s ditty “So Happy Together” by the Turtles, did
little to reassure me about what would certainly be an ugly assault
on literature – “The Great Ghastly.” And in 3D, no less.
It's easy to feel
protective about Fitzgerald, a writer too fragile to live very long.
I was dismayed in 2008 that a delicate short story like “The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had been inflated by David Fincher into a massive
special-effects epic. Gatsby occupies an even more special
place in American literature. Familiar to every schoolchild, it has
been called the “great” novel everyone has read, in comparison to
Ulysses, the “great” novel no one has read.
