Adapting Fitzgerald: Questions of Fidelity

As an English major and avid reader for most of my life, I have long been guilty of condemning otherwise decent films for not being entirely "faithful" to the novels that came before them. I wanted these films to adhere 100% to the novels they were made from because I had read them and fallen in love. Very recently, I've learned how much more I would have enjoyed these movies if I had kept an open mind and let the movie tell the story in its own unique way. It was especially through looking at and discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby and watching the 1974 and 2013 film versions of this novel that I could see the merits of a more loosely adapted film.

Though there are many critics of Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I absolutely love it. Not only is it a fun movie to watch, but I believe it does a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of Fitzgerald's novel. In order to feel the excitement and properly enjoy a movie like this, you really have to suspend all judgement and comparisons to the novel at first. There are many things about the 2013 movie that are unexpected and unorthodox, which leaves you wondering what decade you are actually watching. A prime example of this is the music throughout the movie. A whole argument could be made surrounding the music in this film, but all I will say is that I think it is a clever device that helps make the story accessible to a modern audience, as well as making a fantastic soundtrack. Suspending quick judgments is important in order to see how faithful the movie truly is. Faithful to what, you might say? The movie does change much of the narration of Nick Carraway, and everything does look and feel more modern, but is any of that really as important as we make it out to be?

I would argue that the 2013 film has the most important element of fidelity, which lets me ignore its imperfections and enjoy it wholeheartedly. This movie has what Andre Bazin calls "equivalence of meaning" with the novel. I think the 2013 Gatsby captures something the 1974 version completely misses, which is the heart and spirit of the novel. In the 1974 version, we don't understand Gatsby or his undying hope, we don't feel the carelessness of the Buchanans or the time, and we don't feel the shock or trauma of Myrtle's death. The 2013 version communicates all of these things in a very poignant way. Using some dialogue directly from the novel and some new, scenes are created that give us the world Fitzgerald was trying to critique, and we see why. The movie looks like a big party gone wrong, using fewer words than the novel but communicating the same message, which is the most important thing for a film to do. By the end of the film, we understand why Nick says to Gatsby, "You're worth the whole damn bunch." This is crucial to the novel, and thus, to the film.

A short example of the faithfulness of the 2013 film is the Valley of Ashes scene. The 2013 version uses only three phrases directly from the novel, yet through images, scenery, camera angles, and dialogue it shows in roughly 45 seconds what the novel takes two and a half pages to tell. The 1974 film hardly gives any information about this part of the novel, and it is severely lacking. So, questions of fidelity are not as simple as they seem. An edgy film that on the surface seems out in left field may, in fact, be more true to the novel than it appears. If it has "equivalence of meaning" and captures the purpose behind the novel, than I believe the film is successful in being faithful.