They "didn't come with soundtracks,” writer Mohsin Hamid recently mused in an essay on why he came to love the novel. Unlike movie viewers, "readers got more of the source code -- the abstract symbols we call letters and words -- and assembled more of the story themselves."
As the wide release of Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" nears, Hamid's metaphor feels almost like a challenge. F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous work is definitive American source code, its symbols lodged in the minds of generations of readers. Can watching a film version of this code, as cracked by someone else, ever match the pleasure of reading the book?
Not as long as it continues to be adapted the way it has been for decades, said novelist Joseph O'Neill, whose slow-burning thriller Netherland drew frequent comparisons upon publication to The Great Gatsby . O'Neill said the idea of visually enacting Fitzgerald's narrative ignores that its "surprise element is located at the level of sentence."
"We don't know what happens because we can't quite remember how the sentences work," O'Neill told The Huffington Post. "If you take the plot and try to change it into a three-actor drama for the purposes of a motion picture, you start having problems."
It's a neat diagnosis of why Luhrmann's adaptation may have followed its predecessors and fallen short of the novel's promise.
Curious, we conducted an informal test. We asked 10 book lovers what they remember of Gatsby. Two recalled the pivotal car crash that crowns the novel's narrative arc. One wasn't sure if the action concludes with a murder or a suicide. All, though, remembered specific lines, particularly the novel's loaded opener (Nick Carraway's father's warning that "all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had") and, of course, its luminous last line ("So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.").
This notion of the text's peculiar intractability has bounced around for some time. In a story about Luhrmann's creation in last weekend's New York Times, Charles McGrath called it "practically conventional wisdom that Fitzgerald's novel is unfilmable, because its real power comes not from the plot but the prose."
And yet, filmmakers repeatedly take on the dreaded task of translating it. The challenge yields legendary reactions: Before shooting began on the 1949 film version, the story goes that the increasingly anxious director, Elliot Nugent, headed to the tenth-floor fire escape of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to jump off, so great was the gap between his opinion of the source material and his view of his own ability to do it justice. Nugent didn't jump, but he also ultimately forfeited to Fitzgerald, releasing a film more gangster flick than modern fairy tale, with a Gatsby who repents and "squares himself" for the sake of his honor at the movie's end.
For other desperate souls, translating gives way to transcribing. Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the script for the 1974 version starring Robert Redford, recently told Town & Country that he was so "terrified" by the novel's prose-to-dialogue ratio, he resorted to plundering lines from Fitzgerald's short stories to create scenes he felt would establish a love connection between Daisy and Gatsby on screen.
This was the tactic Coppola advised Luhrmann to use, along with his notes. And Luhrmann has. All through this fresh "Gatsby" press circuit, the Australian director has stressed that his decisions came out of immersing himself in Fitzgerald's writings, including Trimalchio, the little-known, raw predecessor to Gatsby. James L.W. West III, the professor of English who unearthed and first published the ur-text, and whom Luhrmann consulted, said Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby bears the imprint of the protagonist of that early version.
"He's more mysterious," West told The Huffington Post, after seeing the movie. "He's less in control of himself than the Gatsby we remember from the novel, and certainly more violent."
But so far, critics aren't finding Fitzgerald in Luhrmann's vision. Early reviews are largely negative, and the predictions for its opening box office performance are dismal. New Yorker critic David Denby ended his complaint -- in which he calls the adaptation more music video than movie -- with a proposed moratorium, asking that the novel now "be left in peace," as it's "too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies."
For those directors who insist on disturbing it, O'Neill recommends studying a model of adaptation made by none other than Coppola: "Apocalypse Now," a movie that "thoroughly metabolized a novel and re-imagined it in terms of the moving image."
Perhaps the clever move is more obvious: "It didn't make the mistake of calling itself Heart of Darkness."
via Books on HuffingtonPost.com
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