I recently watched two movies. The first was Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. The second was Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby that came out earlier this year. I enjoyed Wright's Atonement more than Luhrmann's Gatsby for a host of reasons[1], but one of the main ones is that Atonement works so much better as an adaptation of its source material.
On paper, they're both highly faithful renderings of their respective books. Adaptations often get blasted for how they change or omit plot details from the source novel (Harry Potter, anyone?), but amazingly, the stories of both Atonement and The Great Gatsby make it onto the big screen nearly intact, save for a few lines of dialogue here and there. It isn't the plot where Atonement succeeds and Gatsby fails as an adaptation. Where these two diverge is in how the directors treat the mechanics of the texts themselves.
The original novels of both Atonement and The Great Gatsby are beautifully written. The prose styles of McEwan and Fitzgerald are so sparkling, soulful, and witty in each of these books that they would be the main attractions for the novels if the plots themselves weren't so engaging. Which is a problem when you're adapting a book into a movie, because movies don't get to use prose.
So, both Wright and Luhrmann had to figure out how to translate the beloved prose styles of their respective source materials into something filmmable—an unenviable task if there ever was one.
What I found so great about Wright's direction in Atonement was not only how gorgeous it was (and it is breathtakingly so) but that its specific brand of gorgeousness is reminiscent of McEwan's prose in the novel. A hallmark of McEwan's writing in the book is how the novel's narration follows the different characters as they walk about the physical spaces in which they live, then reflects the characters' fears, fantasies, and desires onto the descriptions of the objects they interact with. It is this technique that Wright's direction manages to evoke, using lighting and carefully framed shot to accomplish the same effect as McEwan's style. Glares and colors reflected across the faces of the protagonists reveal their thoughts and inner conflicts, and intimate close-up shots on objects or body parts describe the fixations of the characters. Best of all, Wright puts enough faith in his audience and his own direction to avoid expositional dialogue or voiceovers to reiterate what the camera work has already told us. Wright manages to transform the writer's vocabulary of words, sentences, and punctuation into the language of film, and the result is stunning.
Luhrmann, on the other hand, chooses not to translate the mechanics of Fitzgerald's prose into film but the themes. What's so remarkable about the writing in The Great Gatsby is the depth of character insight it provides through the narrator Nick's observations of the people around him. The richness of the metaphors Nick draws out of the characters is at once sardonic and elegiac, and it despite the Roarin' Twenties setting, it feels only the slightest bit tipsy, never raucous. The direction in The Great Gatsby does not resemble Fitzgerald's writing in the slightest. It's instead Luhrmann doing the very Luhrmann-esque thing of juxtaposing modern pop glitz with a period setting in an attempt to make a thematic statement about the story. In Luhrmann's Gatsby, the wildly zooming and panning camerawork depicts Gatsby's parties with kaleidoscopic intensity, colorful and incomprehensible as a 2013 club. The intent, I think, is to bludgeon the audiences with an overload of images and sensory input until they feel the emptiness of the spectacle along with the bored characters. The direction reveals less about Fitzgerald's style and more about the themes he develops in the novel, those of the hollowness of wealth and the narcissistic problems of the American Dream.
I don't have a problem with a director ditching the tone or the style of a novel in favor of injecting the movie with his or her own directoral voice, especially when the voice contributes to thematic insight. That sort of thinking often leads to the very best sorts of adaptations, the ones that forge unique identities as works of art on their own merits (see Apocalypse Now). The problem is that Luhrmann's direction is so redundant with the themes already present in the story's plot and the ever-present voiceover narration that it practically cancels itself out. We already have a plot that shows us how decadent and careless the characters are and Tobey Maguire's voiceover (which, by the way, recites large passages from the Fitzgerald's text verbatim) underlining the characters' virtues, vices, and motivations. Do we need the over-the-top direction to circle, highlight, and draw flashing arrows to these ideas, too? Not really. Unfortunately, circling, highlighting, and pointing is about all the direction does.
The result is that while Atonement feels vibrant and inventive in how it finds ways to turn prose into cinema, The Great Gatsby feels stale and merely derivative of Fitzgerald's most obvious insights. Wright's direction bursts with ideas, but I can't find a meaningful original thought in Luhrmann's.
All that is to say: boy, I sure liked Atonement a lot better than the The Great Gatsby.
Until next time.
1] One being that I just don't like Luhrmann's directing style. I find it kitschy and jittery, and it tends to mute other important aspects of his films, like acting and writing. All Moulin Rouge! did for me was make my eyes hurt.
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