The Great Gatsby Comparison

“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can” ~Jay Gatsby
The latest version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann, uses many of F Scott Fitzgerald’s original descriptions and dialogue. It respects the fact that the book is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, cousin of Daisy, the woman who Gatsby loves. It carefully reproduces various details, such as the clock Gatsby drops when meeting Daisy again for the first time since she married Tom Buchanan five years earlier. It follows Fitzgerald’s instructions that Tom’s lover’s husband’s garage is beside the “valley of ashes” and a huge optician’s billboard portraying the eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg. It accurately presents everything that Fitzgerald describes, using the
He even titles it first just Gatsby then adding by hand, “The Great”. As for that morbid alcoholism, Nick claims in the novel that he’s “been drunk just twice in my
Nick accompanies them, and the movie shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the couple have loud intercourse in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit but something like that is implied. Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive while Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens, that’s not in the book at all. Nick later wakes up at home, half-dressed, and unsure how he got there, while in the book, Nick comes to an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle’s place, owned by one of their friends then he goes to Penn Station to take a train