I think the only fair way to review a movie like The Great Gatsby (IMDB) is to ask how well it stands on its own. How good would this movie be if you had never read the novel, or if the novel had never existed and this were an original work?
By that standard it seems a mixed bag. It’s a high quality production. It looks really terrific. The soundtrack seems a bit off for a story set in the 1920s but there’s nothing technically wrong with it. The acting is appropriate for a rather melodramatic story, including a fine scenery-chewing star turn by Leonardo DiCaprio. The story however is the main problem. As told here it leaves me cold.
The movie begins with a framing device that was not in the original novel but which is presumably intended to allow the movie to be “novelistic”. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) has been committed to a sanitarium for depression and “morbid alcoholism.” His psychiatrist tells him to write down the events that are haunting him. Carraway sits down at a typewriter and begins to pound out a manuscript that will eventually form a novel called The Great Gatsby.
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