The much-awaited film depicting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, The Great Gatsby, was directed by Baz Luhrmann. The movie starred many talented and critically acclaimed actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan (“The Great Gatsby”). The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann 2013) opened May 10, 2013 and produced $50,085,184 the opening weekend in the United States (“The Great Gatsby”). The film was nominated for two Oscars in “Best Achievement in Costume Design” and “Best Achievement in Production Design” (“The Great Gatsby”).
The movie begins with the main character and narrator of the story, Nick Carraway, played by Tobey Maguire, in a facility being treated for alcoholism (“The Great Gatsby”). In a session with his psychiatrist, Nick mentions a man named Gatsby, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio (“The Great Gatsby”). Nick was having some trouble recollecting his thoughts on Gatsby, so his psychiatrist suggests writing about his past. He begins his story by explaining how he moved from Chicago to Long Island, New York in the early 1920’s where “Stocks reached record peaks, and Wall Street boomed a steady golden roar. . . Wall Street was luring the young and ambitious, and [he] was one of them” (Luhrmann 2013). Nick rents a small cottage in West Egg next to the marvelous mansion of the rich and extravagant, Jay Gatsby.
After settling in, Nick drives over to the other side of Long Island, called East Egg, to have dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom Buchanan, played by Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton (“The Great Gatsby”). After some catching up and small conversation, Daisy introduces Nick to her dear friend Jordan Baker, who is played by Elizabeth Debicki (“The Great Gatsby”). It is ap...
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...iend and ultimately leaves New York. The audience is then flashed back to present Nick sitting at a type writer typing the last infamous words of the story, which say “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Luhrmann 2013). Nick then organizes the pages of his story, originally titling it “Gatsby”, but then he changes the title with a pen naming his work “The Great Gatsby”.
Works Cited
Hogan, Mike. "Baz Luhrmann, 'Great Gatsby' Director, Explains The 3D, The Hip Hop, The Sanitarium And More." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 May 2013. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
The Great Gatsby. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. DVD.
"The Great Gatsby." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Weitzman, Elizabeth. "'The Great Gatsby': Movie Review." NY Daily News. NY Daily News, 9 May 2013. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
Upon arriving in New York, Nick visits his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom. The Buchanans live in the posh Long Island district of East Egg; Nick, like Gatsby, resides in nearby West Egg, a less fashionable area looked down upon by those who live in East Egg. West Egg is home to the nouveau riche people who lack established social connections, and tend to vulgarly flaunt their wealth. Like Nick, Tom Buchanan graduated from Yale, and comes from a privileged Midwestern family. Tom is a former football player, a brutal bully obsessed with the preservation of class boundaries. Daisy, by contrast, is an almost ghostlike young woman who affects an air of sophisticated boredom. At the Buchanans's, Nick meets Jordan Baker, a beautiful, if boyish, young woman with a cold and cynical manner. The two will later become romantically involved.
On the hottest day of the summer, Nick drives to East Egg for lunch at Tom and Daisy's house. When the nurse brings in Tom and Daisy's baby girl, Gatsby is stunned. During the awkward afternoon, Gatsby and Daisy cannot hide their love for one another, and Tom finally notices their situation.
In chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby the narrator reveals himself to be Nick Carraway, a man from Minnesota. Nick moved to New York to get a job in the bond business and he rented a house in the West Egg. The West Egg is considered “less fashionable” (5), than the East Egg where all the people with connections live. Nick was invited to dinner at the home of his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, who lived in the East Egg. At dinner Nick meets Jordan, Daisy’s rather laid-back friend, and learns that Tom is having a very open affair with another woman.
The novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald relates the story of the mysterious Jay Gatsby through the eyes of an idealistic man that moves in next door to the eccentric millionaire. Nick Carraway comes to the east coast with dreams of wealth, high society, and success on his mind. It is not long before Gatsby becomes one of his closest friends who offers him the very lifestyle and status that Nick came looking for. As the story unfolds, it is easy to see that the focus on Jay Gatsby creates a false sense of what the story truly is. The Great Gatsby is not the tragic tale of James Gatz (Jay Gatsby), but rather the coming of age story of Nick Carraway. In many ways the journeys of Gatsby and Nick are parallel to one another, but in the end it’s Nick’s initiation into the real world that wins out.
The Great Gatsby is one of the most known novel and movie in the United States. Fitzgerald is the creator of the novel The Great Gatsby; many want to recreate his vision in their own works. Being in a rewrite of the novel or transforming literature in cinema. Luhrmann is the most current director that tried to transform this novel into cinema. However, this is something many directors have tried to do but have not succeeded. Luhrmann has made a good triumph creating this movie. Both Fitzgerald’s and Luhrmann’s approach to The Great Gatsby either by using diction, symbolism, transitions from one scene to another, and color symbolism usage in both the text and the movies; illustrate how Daisy and Gatsby still have an attraction for one another, and how they might want to rekindle their love.
The beginning of the movie starts off in 1929, with Nick in a psychiatric hospital to treat his alcoholism. During one of his sessions with his doctor, he talks about Jay Gatsby and his experience during the summer of 1922. Set in the 1920s where prohibition was heavily enforced, Nick Carraway moves back to the West Egg of New York
The plot centres on a fictional World War I army veteran named Nick Carraway. After his involvement in the war on the allied side with a machine gun battalion, he returned to his home in Chicago. With no clear direction of what he wanted to do with his life, he decided to move to New York to enter into the business of selling bonds. He settled down on an area of Long Island called West Egg, directly beside a more fashionable area of Long Island called West Egg. Across from him lived a rich man named Jay Gatsby who also was a World War I vet. Not far away lived a married couple Daisy and Tom Buchanan which he knew relatively well. It was at their residence that he met a woman, Jordan Baker, who was to become his good friend and later his girl friend. Carraway soon became a good friend with his rich neighbour next door, Gatsby, and soon was exposed to many rumours about this man which caused him to question his relationship with him.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby”, is one of the few novels he wrote in 1925. The novel takes place during the 1920’s following the 1st World War. It is written about a young man named Nick, from the east he moved to the west to learn about the bond business. He ends up moving next to a mysterious man named Gatsby who ends up giving him the lesion of his life.
As the case with most “Novel to Movie” adaptations, screenwriters for films will make minor, and sometimes drastic, adjustments to the original text in order to increase drama and to reach modern audiences. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film interpretation of The Great Gatsby followed the 1925 classic great plot quite accurately, with minor deviations. However, Luhrmann made some notable differences to the characters and settings of The Great Gatsby in order for the story to relate to the current generation and to intensity the plot The novel’s main protagonist, Nick Carraway, came from a sophisticated family; however, they didn’t have enough money to be labeled as “Old Money”. Still, in the book, Nick was more stiff-necked and at times, pretentious
People would do anything when it comes to love. They would do the unthinkable just to be noticed. That’s exactly what Gatsby had to go through. The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925 and has been highly recognized in society since then. One of the main reasons it is considered a classic American novel is because of its success and relevance to American history. It is also your typical love story that never gets old. In this story, the reader gets a glimpse at Jay Gatsby’s lavish life and his over the top parties that are held every weekend. He is living the American Dream. The story is told by Nick Caraway, a young man from Minnesota who moves to West Egg, Long Island for the summer to learn about the bond business. He
The Great Gatsby tells a story of eight people during the summer of 1922 from the observation of Nick Carraway. It's a story about trying to achieve the unattainable, deceit, and tragedy. It takes place around the character Jay Gatz who becomes Jay Gatsby in an attempt to change his persona and attract his long lost love, Daisy. In Nick's telling of the story, Nick and everyone who knew Gatsby, thought he was great. Gatsby threw lavish parties at his beautiful mansion every weekend. He had money, even though no one really seemed to know how he made his money. Gatsby spends years of his life trying to win the heart back of Daisy Buchanan. When they met years ago, he was in the Army and didn't have much money. Daisy came from a wealthy family and she couldn't marry a poor man. This is what drives Jay Gatz to become Jay Gatsby and impress the girl to get her back.
The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway (Toby Maguire), helps reunite lost loves Jay Gatsby, his neighbour (Leonardo DiCarprio), and Daisy Buchanan, his cousin (Carey Mulligan). Only in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, Carraway tells the story from inside a sanitarium, where he is taken to writing it all down as a form of therapy. Fitzgerald’s Nick refers to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this novel”, so the form of The Great Gatsby text written by Nick is almost the same as Luhrmann’s film and he expresses deeper into the story than Fitzgerald. In the film Luhrmann showed us how Nick was writing the tale by hand, then typing, and finally amassing his completed manuscript. He gives the name Gatsby ...
Nick Carraway moves into a small home in West Egg, part of Long Island, New York. He lives across the water from his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her fabulously wealthy and unfaithful husband, Tom. The extraordinarily large mansion next door is owned by a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby. On a visit to Daisy and Tom’s home, Nick meets Jordan a meeting between him and Daisy. The two begin having an affair, but Daisy cannot bring herself to leave Tom, especially after learning the truth about the source of Gatsby’s wealth (Caldicott, 2005).
Daisy was Nick’s second cousin once removed, and Tom Buchanan was Daisy’s hulking brute of a husband and classmate of Nick’s from college. Jordan Baker, a prominent tennis player of the time, was staying with Daisy and Tom. As they sat down and chatted, it was Jordan who mentioned Gatsby, saying that she had been to one of his extravagant parties that he held every weekend. The four sat down to dinner when Tom received a phone call, which Daisy suspected to be from Tom’s mistress. Afterwards, Daisy and Nick talked and Jordan and Tom went out to walk about the grounds. Daisy talked about her little daughter and how when she was born Tom was not even there and she had wished out loud that she would be a fool, for that was the only way she could ever be happy. The four met again at the house and then Jordan went to bed and Nick went home.
This installment of what is considered one of the “great American novels” boasts its garishness through its stunning visual style, once again proving that Baz Luhrmann is not one to be subtle. Even though the defects of this film go beyond just mischaracterization, it seizes the essence of “Gatsby” with an iron fist: a glittering celebration of dreams and the ambitions that every human holds inside of them.