how the great gatsby

Why the Great Gatsby isn’t very great and isn’t very Gatsby The choices made by director Baz Lurmann while creating the adaptation of The Great Gatsby make certain aspects a lot more obvious than the book, which is good for the audience, but ultimately make the movie version of Gatsby very different from the book version. But I’m not saying that it is bad for movies to stray from the books that they are adapting; it just gives the movie a different feeling than the book.
Luhrmann’s choice in characters had an effect on shaping the movie version of The Great Gatsby. Toby Maguire was not a believable Nick, mainly because I couldn’t take him seriously after his Spiderman trilogy. Also the “Nick is gay” theory is a lot more obvious in the movie, such as when he marvels at Gatsby’s grand entrance or when he doesn’t even hesitate to comfort an emotionally unstable Gatsby in his empty house.
Then there’s Gatsby played by Leonardo Dicaprio. Overall, nothing that bad besides his weird tan. His mob connections are shown very clearly though, such as when he shoos away cops with his name card, greets the sketchy mayor in his even sketchier secret bar, or meets with dudes dressed like Al Capone.
One of the advantages of making a film vs. writing a book is the ability to use visuals to enhance the story. In writing, it is much more difficult to show facial expressions and body language than in a movie. Luhrmann takes advantage of these visual features to increase the depth of the story. It allows the audience to see a whole new level of story that might not have been so obvious in the book. That is one of the main differences between the movie and the book, the obvious nature that Luhrmann gives the film. Everything in the movie is given to the audience; there is no need to analyze the story to understand it because Luhrmann feeds the audience everything before they can even formulate their own thoughts.
Back to characters, Daisy was a lot different than the Daisy I pictured in the book. She was supposed to be this rich, extravagant character, but she did the not seem that way in the movie at all. She seemed more like the girl who tries way too hard to seem fancy, but was really just made scenes awkward. Also, it seemed like she already knew Gatsby as Gatsby instead of James Gatz. This killed the suspense that was present in the book.
Tom is a lot smaller than described in the book, he was even shorter than Gatsby, and his voice made it very difficult to take him seriously. If one were to only have watched the movie, they would have missed out on the way Fitzgerald describes Tom and all of his massiveness, which was I expected in the movie.
The modern music also did not work with the movie, specifically in the scene where Nick and Tom “party” with Myrtle and her weird friends. Seriously it was weird.
The variations that make The Great Gatsby movie different from the book are also what make the message Fitzgerald was trying to convey different in the movie.