*Spoilers about both ahead...
The Book
I hated The Great Gatsby in high school. In hindsight, I can't really pin-point why because I remembered almost nothing about it, but I do remember we had to examine the book first to last page and it just wore me out. All that symbolism is a lot for a 15 year old to truck through, especially when some of that symbolism (while no doubt intentional and important) annoyed me more than intrigued me. Okay, okay, I'm sure Gatsby dropped the clock in Nick's house because it symbolized the passage of time and not because he's just rather klutzy. Can we move on please?
Anyway, I did get to re-read it kind of wonderfully with a fresh slate. I remembered bits and pieces but not the twists and turns, and certainly not the ending, so it was like I was reading it for the first time.
One chapter in, and I have to hilariously say that it kind of reminded me of an episode of the Real Housewives. So much wealth and mid-afternoon cocktails while lazily spread out on a couch, complaining about privileged lives. But, even then, you can't deny this book is beautifully, nearly perfectly written. It's the kind of book you highlight passage after passage in because words are woven together the way words were meant to be woven together.
So, ultimately, I liked it a helluva lot more than I did in high school. Perhaps you can just appreciate such a well-written book at my age more than you can as a teenager and perhaps because there was no homework that came after reading it (thank everything), I could just...read it. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I re-read it.
But, oh man, did I hate nearly every single character in this book. These were terrible people, just terrible, and not terrible in the way I usually like my characters--terribly flawed but so terribly human that you relate to them and end up incredibly fond of them. Terrible as in, YOU ARE TERRIBLE, JUMP OFF A CLIFF.
All of them! Even Gatsby, who I suspect you aren't supposed to find terrible, I found terrible because he thought that a woman who couldn't love him penniless was worth all he went through to win her back. He was in love with a coward and he wasn't even in love with her despite that, he was in love with her without realizing it, and that made him infuriating to me.
Most of the characters were disgustingly rich and disgustingly terrible and disgustingly lazy and also disgustingly drunk most of the book, and I would have hated almost all of them if I had somehow turned up at a party with them. In short, it was a beautiful book about truly terrible people. I have been known to like a sad ending, though, and this book certainly had that.
Still, let's talk about some of my favorite lines in it:
"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."
"It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."
The last, perfect line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
The movie
Well, the movie stayed pretty damn true to the book, didn't it? The words literally appeared on the screen and entire scenes were played out exactly as written. For that, I liked it. It came to life as I had read it, quite honestly, and I only had very small issues with it, including:
- Leo did a great job, honestly. To me, he's far more attractive in movies than in pictures, and I almost always buy him in a role more than I think I will because he's just better on the screen. (Hello, The Departed, one of my favorite movies of all time.) But he still felt a litttttle old for this role. He's not that much older than the character (6 years), but he felt much older, for some reason.
- Speaking of, Daisy was dark-haired in the book (right?) and I think Carey would have looked even better dark-haired in the movie, so why the blonde choice, producers?
- The ending! One of my favorite parts of the book was how Nick tried desparately to get people to attend the funeral (going into the city to visit Winebrenner, even) and everyone disregarded him. Then, Gatsby's father showed up, and it was this sadly poetic look at how Gatsby built his life around people who didn't matter and abandoned the people who did. I wish they would have showed that scene as written.
At the end of the movie, though, I thought the same things I thought at the end of the book. Such terrible, selfish, bored people.
I don't know if all this means I ultimately loved it or still hated it.
Probably a little of both.