This was an impression that I agreed with for perhaps the first half of the film. Having Tobey Maguire reading the Fitzgerald prose over the images seems heavy-handed and awkward at first glance. But I found this view harder to maintain the more I was forced to face the fact that Nick Carraway is himself a rich yet elusive character, and possibly the primary character of this story. His subjectivity is the center of the book, and so making it the center of the movie seems appropriate, even essential. Visually representing this subjectivity can only go so far, and when you have words as beautiful as Fitzgerald’s at your disposal, Luhrmann seems to be unable to resist employing them. Hard to blame him for that.
The choice to have Carraway in rehab writing his account on the possible source of his problems with booze is actually, dare I say, inspired. This puts a whole new level of insight into Nick, making his process of trying to figure out what it is about Gatsby that fascinates him so much the principal quest of the film. It’s a movie about a writer. Having him in the sanatorium also highlights the autobiographical aspect of Nick Carraway essentially being a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself, whose personal history with alcohol abuse was drawn from for this addition to the story. The prose then becomes a source of healing, its inspiration serving as medicine or relief for Nick’s tortured mind. I’ve also never been the type to be offended by literary exposition in movies if it serves more than one purpose, as I would say it does here. I don’t know, it worked for me.
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