When it comes to making movies based off of books, producers
have a hard time following the book directly. They like to add their own little
things to the movie that don’t pertain to the novel. That was not the case with
The Great Gatsby. In the newest
movie, I think the producer followed the novel quite well to follow the novel.
All of the characters were the same. Both the movie and the
novel both come from Nick’s point of view. In the movie, however, Nick was in
an asylum. I’m not sure why he was, because it didn’t really have anything to
do with the main plot. The fact that he was in an asylum did help him narrate
the story, though. We heard a lot of direct quotes, which I thought was a good
idea. Gatsby was also very similar. He was a man that we didn’t know anything
about until almost the end of the novel. He kept to himself and rarely lost his
temper. Tom and Daisy’s relationship was just like the novel. They pretended to
love each other on the outside, but on the inside, they both loved other
people. Something I didn’t like about the movie is that they didn’t really show
Nick and Jordan’s relationship. They only showed the scene where Nick told her
he didn’t want to go inside the Buchanan’s house after the car accident. They
failed to show that Nick told Jordan he didn’t want to be with her.
Besides that, most of
the characters followed the novel quite well. Myrtle and Wilson were almost the
same. I don’t, however, remember the scene where Wilson was yelling at Myrtle,
demanding to tell him where she got her pearls. This was right before Myrtle
ran out in front of the road. They also left out the scene where Wilson talked
to a detective about who could possibly be the murderer. In the movie, Tom told
Wilson right away that it was Gatsby that murdered his wife. I don’t think that
followed the novel.
The plot was the same, too. This novel is a love story
between Gatsby and Daisy. It is all about affairs, bootlegged alcohol, and living
life in the ‘20s. In a lot of the specific scenes with Daisy and Gatsby, they
used direct quotes from the novel. I liked this, because by doing that they
couldn’t add anything that Fitzgerald didn’t want between them. They couldn’t
modernize their love and I thought that was very important.
Overall, I really liked the movie. I thought it followed the story quite well, just left out a few scenes. I definitely think the entire cast took a lot of time in order to show the life of the '20s and be connected to the novel.
