15 January 2018
No effort at putting Fitzgerald's novel on screen has ever been entirely successful, certainly not in terms of fidelity to his vision. The medium of film has a major obstacle to overcome if it is to provide a faithful rendering of a first-person novel, such as the The Great Gatsby: in general, film cameras show everything in the third person, not from the vantage point of a particular character but from a stance separated from any consciousness. If our reading experience of a first-person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular perspective of the character telling the story-when is it not?-then recreating that reading experience through the third person of film is impossible.
