In the book “The Great Gatsby”, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it gives a grand amount of details towards character development, main themes, and key scenes. While within the movie “The Great Gatsby”, by Baz Luhrmann, Baz couldn’t get into as much depth as a book did due to time restrictions. The movie gives you shorter examples of most scenes so that it can fully grasp every moment of the book for the most part, it also takes out a few situations from the book.So, what isbetter, The Great Gatsby movie Vs book ?
The way Baz Luhrmann dramatizes each main scene was sometimes different for each once. There was such a scene where conflict was very apparent within the book and it lasted for a longer time, while in the movie it lasted all of 5 seconds, about, so it didn’t have as much power to it. The scene of subject is when Tom, Myrtle, Tom went to Tom’s apartment in the city and during that time Myrtle said something and Tom slapped her for it after telling her not to say it. Myrtle had said “ ‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai-” and due to her saying this while, Tom and her previously were discussing whether she had any right to say Daisy’s name or not, Tom didn’t didn’t believe that she had a right to call out her name so he slapped her across the face. The movie showed this event and Myrtle had only said her name once then Tom slapped her. Making this scene only showing this Baz had also made it so that during the slap it was a bit in slow motion, even with those added effects it didn’t really add any amount of power and came through the scene in a more sudden and felt more forced.
Within both the book and movie they both have their own powers for introducing characters. The book gave us information for our mind to go wild with and imagine whatever. While in the movie it gave us the scene itself and went “BAM” new character without much to introduce them if any. Both in the book and movie we are not introduced to Gatsby at the beginning and have to wait to see and hear what he is all about. This gives us a sense of suspense and wonder as we wait for this legendary character “Jay Gatsby” to appear and to show us what this man is all about. Within the book Gatsby introduced as the party goes on and Nick is moving around looking for Gatsby to thank him, while Gatsby says, “I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.” Within the movie Gatsby is still introduced the same way, but there are fireworks that go off as he raises a glass and it goes into a slight bit of slow motion to give a sense of empowerment, it also makes Gatsby seem like an even greater man than we thought.
While the movie doesn’t give the most detail, it does give us a picture/video to go with the words we hear so we don’t have to just rely on imagination. The book gives us a more abundance of detail, but since it’s a book all we have is our own imagination to see how each event would play out. In the movie Gatsby had fireworks and other sounds to make his introduction to us more powerful and Tom is only given a very small amount of time to display his displeasure of Myrtle saying Daisy’s name. In the book Gatsby only has himself and we are given a description of his facial features and expressions and Tom has a bit of a longer time to show his displeasure as Myrtle says Daisy’s name a few more times than just one so it shows how much Tom dislikes it when Myrtle says Daisy’s name. In the movie, everything was usually done quickly or skipped because of a limited amount of time, while in the book everything could take however long it needed.
