Gotham Diary:
The Gatsby Approach
30 April 2013
I wish I had a list, a list of all the movies, most of them recent, that show a carful of characters making their way to Manhattan (for the first time!) by crossing the East River on the Queensborough Bridge. According to Hollywood, this is how one enters the Big Apple. In fact, it is how one enters Gotham from Long Island, if one is too cheap to take the Midtown Tunnel, and one enjoys the company of very large trucks. Some folks, it’s true, get taken for a ride by unscrupulous cab drivers, en route from Kennedy Airport. (The fare is fixed, so the driver pockets the toll money.) To enjoy the drive over the Queensborough as advertised in the movies, you really have to be sitting on the roof of the car.
The scenes are all the same. Right off the bat, I can think of one: In The Reader, Ralph Fiennes sits the back seat of a taxi on his way to visit a Holocaust victim on Park Avenue. (He’s playing someone from Germany who might well not know his way around the city’s “shortcuts.”) Before we see the actor, the camera plays with the bridge, panning through the beams and trusses to take in the Manhattan skyline. But why listen to me?
Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city as seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
That’s from Chapter Four of The Great Gatsby. I ought to have made the connection a long time ago. What simpler way to pay cinematic homage to the big fish that got away, the great American novel that has eluded filmmakers for the better part of a century? Flickering light among the girders! The great city rising at the end of a magic bridge, waiting to be discovered, to yield up its riches and its secrets to optimistic newcomers!
I have to pin down a movie in which a party of three or four travel from New Jersey to Manhattan via the Queensborough Bridge. There’s got to be at least one case of a director who couldn’t resist flying on sentiment in the face of plausibility. How about Stop Loss?
***
The Gatsby Approach was first deployed, I’ll venture, in a film where it made sense. Reading Gatsby this time, I kept thinking admiringly of Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation. Every time Gatsby said “old sport,” I heard Robert Redford’s voice, and it sounded right. This is not the time to look into the colossal failure of the movie when it opened. It’s enough to say that it has aged very nicely. I’m not sure about Mia Farrow — not just Ms Farrow herself but also the film’s general adoration of the corrupt Daisy Buchanan. In the novel, it’s pretty clear that the adoration is limited to Gatsby himself, and that Daisy is in every way an earthier woman than the ethereal Mia Farrrow. There is also a slightly static quality to the film, as if it were a slideshow of illustrations of the text. Certainly it lacks the power of the novel, which is driven by a remarkable narrator. The movie can tell the story, which is almost as remarkable, but it can’t harness the narrator, no matter how many snips of voice-over transcription it indulges in. The Great Gatsby is a book to be read.
I was chilled by how close it seemed, the world of Gatsby. Many things have changed since 1922, but somehow the story does not seem “historical.” The ashpiles long ago gave way to the World’s Fairs, and Robert Moses’s system of parkways were about to obviate one of Fitzgerald’s key plot points. It is not, however, that the world today still looks and feels as it did then. It doesn’t. Our manners are more sophisticated at every level. But the myth that Fitzgerald spun out of American life in the wake of World War I still beats with a strong pulse. Stylish dishonesty and whitewashed vulgarity have not disappeared from city life. Men and women continue to trip up, big time, on the discontinuities of pretension and desire.
I suppose that it’s common to read The Great Gatsby as the story of an American dream gone wrong, with Jay Gatsby as the dreamer. This time, however, I focused more on what Gatsby was up against: the massive, brutish power of Tom Buchanan’s moneyed entitlement. This is a fairy tale told as things really are: boys from nowhere haven’t got a chance of beating entrenched family fortunes. Fitzgerald’s portrait of the philistine philanderer from whom Gatsby so naively intends to steal his wife is not a caricature; it conveys the full authority of a man deeply accustomed to having his own way. His dismissal of Gatsby the end of the “scene” in the Plaza suite is assured and unanswerable.
“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr Gatsby’s car.”
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.
“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”
And it is. The last that we see of Tom and Daisy shows us that Gatsby’s dream was always a fantasy, pitifully lacking in objective correlatives.
Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale — and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
The glamor has collapsed, only to reveal the homely reality of the Buchanans’ attachment. What wicked fun it was, to think it might have ended otherwise. But: “Her voice is full of money,” says Gatsby. So are Tom’s pockets.
***
We look forward to seeing Baz Luhrman’s attempt to capture the Gatsby magic. I’ll have a particular eye on Joel Edgerton, the versatile actor who’ll be playing Tom.