2013's Great Gatsby Entertains, But Overshares the Mystery

I may be biased since The Great Gatsby has been my favorite novel for a long time, but it's a really tough one to pull off on film.

The new version tries its best with help from a host of gimmicks - namely rap music in the jazz age and over-the-top Moulin Rouge-like production pieces. (I suppose it's difficult to fault Director Baz Luhrmann for trying this approach.)

It's not that these elements are bad, they just happen to be the sections I probably dislike the most about 2013's Great Gatsby, but I think the part that leaves me most unsettled is how the creators spell out every little detail of the characters, plot, and motivations. The best thing about the book, and why I keep coming back to it every five years or so, is that I'm not entirely quite sure exactly what happens. I can't quite fully grasp all of author F. Scott Fitzgerald's intentions and meanings, and I read into it a little bit different every time.

The mystery of Jay Gatsby is, after all, what the story is all about. And the film actually does very well at withholding the secrets for a very long time. But it can't help itself, as Tobey Maguire's Nick Carraway blurts it all out towards the end.

Leo DiCaprio is probably the best Gatsby there may ever be for a film version. (I think this probably falls around DiCaprio's seventh-best movie.) He is dashing, a little bit wacky, and mysterious. Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton are also pretty perfect as the shallow and reckless Daisy and Tom Buchanan. Maguire is alright, but I've always pictured Carraway to be an equal in the looks (if not the money) department to his neighbor Gatsby. He is a little too timid for this role.

The cinematography is beautiful and should be a prime candidate for the Academy Award. Some of the dialogue scenes, when the film almost replicates what a stage production might look like, are also filmed perfectly, especially the scene when Gatsby announces he is taking Daisy from Tom.

The rest isn't quite there, but it's saying quite a bit just to pull off The Great Gatsby without it being a total disaster.

***1/2 out of ***** stars

Classic Reads: A Farewell to Arms Introduces Us to Hemingway's "Lost Generation"

The is the second in a series of posts about classic books that I, as an English literature undergrad major, really need to read or re-read to make my life complete. 

A beautifully described story combined with a depressing ending is pretty much par for the course for the nearly unmatchable Ernest Hemingway. And A Farewell to Arms, described by his mentor Gertrude Stein as his best novel, is no exception.


The story, at its essence, is about how war, and really society in general, "kills you in the end." This is especially true of the World War I generation of which Hemingway writes about, and he argues that those who fought in it became a generation of cynics. Hemingway, having served as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, bases a lot of the social commentary on his own wartime experiences, including the nearly-unheard-of-at-the-time unmarried love affair between American Frederic Henry and British nurse Catherine Barkley.


While serving on ambulance duty in the Italian army, Frederic is caught in the line of mortar shrapnel, which turns his legs to "hamburger." While he recovers in Catherine's care in Milan, they take carriage rides in the park, attend horse races, and dine in street-side cafes. Right before he leaves to return to duty, Catherine informs Frederic she's pregnant but refuses to marry him.


With morale sinking and a once-winnable battle looking more hopeless, Frederic's best friend Rinaldi contracts syphilis. And it gets worse. Retreating, their vehicle gets stuck and they have to hide in barns, dodge Austrian patrols, and even avoid trigger-happy Italian sentries on their own side. Finally, Frederic is grabbed by an italian military policeman and accused of being a spy. Sitting in prison and awaiting execution, he determines the war is over for him and he should say his "farewell to arms."


While the guards are busy executing another prisoner, Frederic is able to escape and swim down an icy river. He can't find Catherine in Milan but eventually reunites with her and they escape to the mountains of Montreux, Switzerland. They play chess, cards, go skiing, and take long walks, discussing what they will do at the end of the war. But then the baby is delivered dead and Catherine soon dies as well, in Frederic's arms. The story ends with him walking through the streets, aimless and broken.


This is clearly one of the greatest novels of all time. However, it's only my second-favorite of Hemingway's "lost generation" novels. The Sun Also Rises is in my top three novels, along with The Great Gatsby and On the Road.

Midnight in Paris a Literary and Artistic Delight

Midnight in Paris would land somewhere in the middle of my list of the best Woody Allen films. The famed director is clearly still at the top of his game, with the only difference from his work of the 1970s being that other people besides him play the "Woody Allen role."

This time it's Owen Wilson as the neurotic protagonist. He does a great job navigating an era (1920s Flapper expat Paris) that has been fascinating to me ever since my two favorite novels became F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

And the performances of the actors who play the legends of that time are wonderful. When Owen Wilson, playing an L.A. screenwriter on an extended vacation to the City of Lights with his non-supportive fiancee and her lousy rich parents, slips into a time warp each night, he comes alive befriending the likes of a respectively sensitive and crazy F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, a surreal Salvador Dali, an unthoughtful Pablo Picasso, an artistic guru Gertrude Stein, and a rowdy Hemingway (with this movie released in a timely way, close to the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's Idaho suicide).

Allen's brilliance balances on his humor (Side Effects and Without Feathers are still two of the greatest comedy essay collections ever known to mankind) and his insight into how the times we live in never seem as interesting as other historical periods. We're disillusioned, and that's a big part of what makes Midnight in Paris so timeless.

Not to mention, the opening sequence is almost as good as a round-trip ticket to Paris. All the sights are included.

**** out of ***** stars