F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby may not quite be among the great literary classics, but it is a lovely book and a sentimental favourite. This film at least takes a noble stab adapting it, but it does come up well short. Its good points are really beautiful, but it does have too many flaws and it also comes across as flat. It is visually stunning with period detail most lavish and some of the loveliest photography of any 1970s period drama. The music is very authentic to the 1920s era and manages to be catchy and lushly orchestrated without being too glib or mushy. The Great Gatsby is also one of those films where the supporting performances are better than the leads with Sam Waterson and Scott Wilson giving the best performances. Waterson's Nick is like the glue of the storytelling and does it with charm, sympathy and dignity, while Wilson is very touching and haunting as Georhe, a very conflicted character. Karen Black has a ball, Lois Chiles is entrancing and witty(part of me thinks that she would have made for a better Daisy) and while Bruce Dern may not fit the role of Tom physically he is very oily and brutish and gets the attitude and mannerisms spot on. Aside from being too overlong and too leisurely paced, the major debits are the lacklustre leads and that it suffers from being too faithful, sorry about parroting what others have said but it just goes to show that it is the general consensus. Robert Redford is very handsome but his Gatsby rather uncharismatic and too restrained, while Mia Farrow is the anti-thesis, playing Daisy much too stridently that she comes across as irresponsible and annoying. The two don't have much chemistry between them either. Francis Ford Coppola's script and Jack Clayton's direction do deserve credit for making an effort to be faithful to the book, that's never been compulsory in adaptations but it does help. Sadly that doesn't work, an example of being too faithful suffering from sapping the life, passion or emotion out of the content. The script is far too dry and wordy, also more skimming-the-surface quality rather than having depth, and while Clayton does try to allow the drama breathe because the drama is so stillborn as a consequence of how it is written it comes across as too languid. All in all, very beautiful to watch and listen to with a good supporting cast but the lack of depth and the dull pacing as well as the leads being not up to the task it is also very flat. 5/10 Bethany Cox
Review of The Great Gatsby
