Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Moira WalshMay 08, 2013

By the time I saw The Great Gatsby, it had already opened, and at least some critical notices were suggesting that it was a "bomb." Perhaps it was my lack of expectations that caused me to be pleasantly surprised. Now I admit that Robert Redford, through no particular fault of his own, is all wrong in the title role. I don't know whether at best Jay Gatsby (born Gatz), the mysterious and probably crooked tycoon who was destroyed by his obsession with a flighty millionairess, could be made convincing for today's audiences. In any case the main point about F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby was that he was an obsessed outsider, trying to buy his way into the circles of the rich and social. Redford has the misfortune to look as though he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and educated at Harvard.

Otherwise, I had no serious quarrel with the film's conception. Forty years ago, Fitzgerald wrote a stark little contemporary fable. But today it is a period piece and the elaborate period trappings are necessary. (And besides, the film's decor, in the broadest sense, is breathtaking and in itself worth the price of admission.) The performances by such people as Mia Farrow, as the despicable heroine, Daisy, Bruce Dern as her loutish husband, and especially Sam Waterston as Nick, the narrator-onlooker, are surprisingly good. And despite the heavy trappings the story is still a grimly arresting cautionary tale. But I wonder if the film can possibly live up to the aura created in the public's mind by what may very well be the most elaborate and omnipresent promotional campaign in screen history.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

A community gathers in resistance. Photo by Dany Díaz Mejía. Photo courtesy of Rene Aleman Resistance Camp.
“We are alive only through the grace of God. At one point, I got messages saying someone had offered 1 million lempiras [$38,000] to have me killed.”
Dany Díaz MejíaJuly 02, 2025
Workers unload food commodities from Catholic Relief Services and USAID in the village of Behera, near Tulear, Madagascar, Oct. 22, 2016. (OSV News Photo/Nancy McNally, Catholic Relief Services)
The end of U.S.A.I.D. will result in the loss of a “staggering” 14 million lives by 2030, including the deaths of 4.5 million children under age 5.
Kevin ClarkeJuly 02, 2025
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Terrance Klein
Terrance KleinJuly 02, 2025