the great gatsby book vs movie essay

The Great Gatsby: 9 Big Differences Between The Book And Movie

Here's a rundown of the changes.

Putting together a film based on a highly acclaimed literary work full of phrasings and lines of dialogue that have forever been burned into readers' minds is largely a thankless task. Creating a film that maintains the heart and soul of such a literary work and even many of its most graceful lines is nearly impossible to accomplish, and in that aspect, director Baz Luhrmann has plenty of troubles with The Great Gatsby . F. Scott Fitzgerald's descriptive sentences are almost as important as his dialogue and tossing some of the finest lines from the book into ashy script on the screen isn't the best way to make the most of those moments. Nor is taking creative license in certain big moments in order to speed up the storytelling process.

In other ways, Luhrmann owns his portrayal of The Great Gatsby , keeping the energy and the often frenetic pace of the twenties by speeding forward into nights of partying and langouring through days of idle play. Like the director's other works---especially Moulin Rouge -- The Great Gatsby is noticeably, unmistakably Luhrmann's and whether or not you believe in his vision is largely dependent on your tolerance of the man's idea of spectacle. It would be nearly impossible to outdo Mr. Fitzgerald, and so Luhrmann tries to visually gives us as different a world as possible while still maintaining the quality of the venerable writer's pages. It's not the movie Fitzgerald would have written, but he was never all that good at creating screenplays, anyway.

Following are the nine biggest changes I noticed in my screening of The Great Gatsby . Feel free to remark on any changes you feel may have been more noticeable. There are many spoilers in The Great Gatsby book to movie comparison. Do not delve in if you want the film to be a surprise .

To give a frame to Nick Carraway's narration, Luhrmann introduces us to a broken Nick, who is working with a doctor to recover his health after troubles with alcohol. This seems a little distasteful, since Carraway comes across as a mostly careful and considerate individual. Asking us to see him out of sorts after Gatsby's death is more than a bit of a stretch, especially as Luhrmann also tasks the character with writing The Great Gatsby .

elizabeth debicki jordan baker the great gatsby

We learn Jordan Baker is an athlete nearly immediately. Though this in itself doesn't mean much, her entire storyline is sped up and her unlikely romance with Nick is cut out for the sake of time. In the book, the two only ever seem to have a casual affection for each another, especially as Jordan is shown to be dishonest, but in the film, she's a blank canvass we never get to know all that much about. This actually makes her character quite a bit more mysterious and likable, though.

Not only is Jordan a tepid version of her novel character, Daisy also lacks a certain spark and an underlying pettiness that propels her character forward in the book. Instead of offering a voice ringing like money, she offers a weak will and a damsel-in-distress persona that doesn't suit the character, or actress Carey Mulligan , either. In the book, she's careless. Here, she's more often thoughtless.

We get an early hint that Gatsby is wistful and waiting for someone before Carraway even goes to New York and gets roaring drunk. He sees his neighbor out on the dock late in the evening, staring across the harbor. It's easy for audience members who have read the book to decipher what he is thinking, but the small moment certainly gives fans an extra foreshadowing of the big reveal in the book.

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While Fitzgerald's book always feels very much a product of a particular period in time, Luhrmann's work always seems like one grand costume party, irrevocably modern and full of rap music. He pairs this with quiet moments between our main characters that give us a breather and result in a stylistic film that manages to feel like Fitzgerald's book and nothing like it at all.

When Nick luncheons with Gatsby and Mr. Wolfsheim, Luhrmann takes us through a secret door in a barbershop and into a speakeasy full of dancing women and at least slightly corrupt men. To prove a point about corruption, Luhrmann even places the police commissioner on the premise. It's a little heavy-handed, but who doesn't want to see a speakeasy in a movie set during prohibition?

When Gatsby is verbally attacked by Tom in New York, much of the dialogue is the same. However, when Gatsby begins to lose control, begins to realize that Daisy is present in the room but may be out of his grasp, his "face that could kill a man" morphs into a childish freak out where Gatsby even screams, "Shut up." The childish antic is a nice callback to the time Carraway chides him for behaving childishly before he meets Daisy for tea.

jason clarke wilson and joel edgerton tom the great gatsby

Tom Buchanan becomes a super villain by the end of the film, painting a murderous image into Wilson's head and convincing him to do the bad deed. Making Tom into an overt bad guy is convenient to the plot, but changing Tom from an unlikable guy into a ruthless villain seems lazy and too cheap of a behavior for the character.

leonardo dicaprio gatsby the great gatsby

In the end, when Gatsby goes swimming, waiting for Daisy to call, he is shot and taken away from his dream---of success, of getting the girl---while the phone rings in the background. Though we later perceive it is Carraway, for a moment, we get to see Gatsby's great hope swell once more, even as his life dims, and we get to wonder whether or not Daisy is on the line, and what she would say if she was.

Jessica Rawden is Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. She’s been kicking out news stories since 2007 and joined the full-time staff in 2014. She oversees news content, hiring and training for the site, and her areas of expertise include theme parks, rom-coms, Hallmark (particularly Christmas movie season), reality TV, celebrity interviews and primetime. She loves a good animated movie. Jessica has a Masters in Library Science degree from Indiana University, and used to be found behind a reference desk most definitely not shushing people. She now uses those skills in researching and tracking down information in very different ways.

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How Faithful Is The Great Gatsby ?

Ever since Baz Luhrmann announced that he was adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby —and especially after he revealed that he’d be doing it in 3-D—much digital ink has been spilled about the hideous sacrilege that was sure to follow. Nevermind that Luhrmann’s previous adaptation, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet , was quite true to both the language and the spirit of that legendary play; Gatsby , as David Denby puts it in The New Yorker this week, is “ too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies ,” and especially for such an unsubtle filmmaker as Luhrmann.

So the argument goes, anyway. In fact, Fitzgerald’s novel, while great, is not, for the most part, terribly subtle. And though it has moments of real tenderness, it also has melodrama, murder, adultery, and, of course, wild parties. In any case, we can put aside, for the moment, the larger question of whether Luhrmann captured the spirit of Gatsby , which is very much open for debate . There’s a simpler question to address first: How faithful was the filmmaker to the letter of Fitzgerald’s book?

Below is a breakdown of the ways in which the new film departs from the classic novel.

The Frame Story Luhrmann’s chief departure from the novel arrives right at the beginning, with a frame story in which the narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), some time after that summer spent with Gatsby & co., has checked into a sanitarium, diagnosed by a doctor of some sort as “morbidly alcoholic.” Fitzgerald’s Nick does refer to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this book ” (emphasis mine), so the idea that The Great Gatsby is a text written by Nick is not entirely original with Luhrmann—though the filmmaker takes this much further than Fitzgerald, showing Nick writing by hand, then typing, and finally compiling his finished manuscript. He even titles it, first just Gatsby , then adding, by hand, “The Great,” in a concluding flourish. ( Fitzgerald himself went through many more potential titles .) As for that morbid alcoholism, Nick claims in the novel that he’s “been drunk just twice in my life,” but the movie slyly implies that he’s in denial, by showing him cross out “once” for “twice,” and then, in the frame story, suggesting that it was far more than that, really.

Jordan and Nick The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out one of the side stories: the affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy’s from Louisville who is a well-known golfer. Daisy promises to set them up, to push them “accidentally in linen closets and … out to sea in a boat,” a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the film, the matter is dropped. Luhrmann’s Nick says he found Jordan “frightening” at first, a word Carraway doesn’t apply to her in the novel—and later at Gatsby’s we see Jordan whisked away from Nick by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the novel, they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer.

The Apartment Party The film, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the adulterous couple have loud sex in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit—but something like that is implied: Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive; Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens; that’s not in the novel at all. Luhrmann’s Nick wakes up at home, half-dressed, unsure how he got there, while Fitzgerald’s narrator comes to in an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle’s place, owned by one of their friends (and party-guests); he then goes to Penn Station to take the 4 o’clock train home.

Lunch With Wolfsheim In the book, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a “well-fanned 42 nd Street cellar,” where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In the movie, Gatsby and Nick go to a barber shop with a hidden entrance to a speakeasy, and once inside they see not only Wolfsheim but also the police commissioner—who, in the book as in the film, Gatsby was “able to do … a favor once.” They also see there (if I understood things correctly) Nick’s boss, whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom’s friend Walter Chase. (In the novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.) The speakeasy features entertainment from a bevy of Josephine Baker-like dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.

Race At least one reviewer—David Denby again—has protested Luhmann’s decision to cast an Indian actor, Amitabh Bachchan, as Wolfsheim, a character based on notorious Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein. But faithfulness in this case probably would have meant anti-Semitism, since it is very hard to defend Fitzgerald’s characterization of the “small, flat-nosed Jew” with a “large head” and “two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.” Casting Bachchan preserves the character’s otherness while complicating the rather gruesome stereotype Fitzgerald employed. Luhrmann appears to have given some thought to this, given that he faithfully keeps key passages from the novel about race: Tom’s trumpeting of a racist book called Rise of the Colored Empires (which had a real-world inspiration ), Nick’s glimpse of apparently wealthy black men and women being driven into Manhattan by a white chauffeur, and Tom’s later diatribe about “intermarriage between black and white.”

The Finnish Woman and Ella Kaye Did you know that Nick Carraway had a maid? This is easy to forget, since Nick seems generally financially a bit strapped, certainly in comparison to his rich neighbors. But in the novel he employs “a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.” She makes a few appearances in the book but is understandably cut from the movie. So is Ella Kaye, the seemingly conniving woman who manages to snag the inheritance of Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who first prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody’s wealth goes to his family.

Gatsby’s Death and Funeral Near the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic husband of Tom’s mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed her—and that, what’s more, he might have been the one she was sleeping with on the side. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder: The book says that Gatsby grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” (i.e., a floater ) and headed to his pool, then Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He’s then shot, and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and go way with him. None of that happens in the book.

Gatsby is, in both versions, lonely in death, but the film is even crueler to him in this regard, dropping the last-minute appearance of his father and the unexpected arrival at the funeral of a man who Nick previously met in Gatsby’s study. This is the same man who famously points out that Gatsby has real books, but hasn’t cut the pages. We meet him in the movie in that study, but he makes no mention of the books, and his subsequent appearance is dropped entirely.

Read more in Slate about The Great Gatsby .

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Examining The Great Gatsby : Movie Vs Book

Known as one of the great American novels, this book was not an instant success. In fact, it bombed when it was published in 1925. Yet today, it is regarded as a top-rated piece of literature. This novel was later turned into a Baz Luhrmann film, and critics have made sure to point out some main differences!

If you were a fan of this novel and later watched the movie, you will be familiar with the differences. You can also read a Great Gatsby essay to learn how others feel the movie measures up. Here, we take a closer look at these main differences in The Great Gatsby movie compared to the original piece of literature. While the storyline is similar, there are some distinct differences. These can appeal to or repel fans of the original story.

Major Differences to Note

When you first pick up this novel, you will enter the world of Nick Carraway. He begins telling a story from a future time. However, when the movie starts, Nick is receiving assistance from an institution and is being treated for alcoholism as well as depression. The story then continues to be told from this institutional setting.

As a literature fan, you will pay close attention to every character mentioned. In this novel, you will come across Jordan Baker quite often, but he does not play such a large role on screen. While reading The Great Gatsby , Baker is accused of being a cheater when playing golf and he currently is engaged. None of this is mentioned in initial movie adaptations.

Another major difference that can quickly be noticed is in the party scene. It was written to occur during the 1920s, though the movie ignores this timeline and presents a modern setting with the addition of pop music in the soundtrack.

You will also pick up on how the funeral is depicted and may be disappointed with these scenes. Despite their love affair, Daisy, Tom Buchanan’s wife, does not attend Gatsby’s funeral, but when reading the novel, Owl Eyes and Gatsby’s father are present. Movie watchers will note that there is not a single soul present to mourn his death, adding to a feeling of loneliness experienced by viewers. This was not experienced by readers.

Great Gatsby Films

After receiving attention and awards for being an amazing novel, movies started being made. The first film was released in 1926, one year after the release of the novel. There was also a film in 1949, starring Alan Ladd. This version was not as accurate to the novel’s plot and focuses on various criminal activities of Gatsby.

In 1974, yet another film was created, this one starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Expensive scenery and costumes depicting wealth were used in filming, but there are many differences that can be quickly observed, such as the weather when Gatsby and Daisy reunite. Based on the novel, it was a rainy day, yet the film presents a sunny and beautiful afternoon. Despite some major differences, this 1974 version has been the closest adaptation of the novel.

Gatsby didn’t die there. He appeared on screen again in 2013 with a modern version directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Elizabeth Debicki, and Carey Mulligan. This version is a joy to watch if you are seeking more jazz and a better understanding of that era in American history.

Why Watch the Movies?

If you have read this novel and are aware of major differences in films, some may wonder why you would even bother watching these. There are some great advantages to seeing people act a story out on screen instead of flipping pages. You will find amazing character representations in the various films, and actors will bring your favourite character to life.

There are also some amazing visuals that are used by filmmakers, such as extravagant parties. By being able to see party settings, you can better understand how people lived during this era and how wealthy characters acted.

While watching The Great Gatsby is a nice way to spend an hour or so, it can be disappointing to literature fans. There are many deviations and inaccuracies from the novel, while some important details are omitted.

You will also be getting a director’s impression of this novel instead of what Fitzgerald actually intended. Every novel is read and understood in a different way, and a director brings their vision to a screen. This can complicate things since not every theme or message will be portrayed. The problem with watching a film instead of reading written pages is that you may miss an entire theme the author has intended. In this case, it is the false hope of an American dream and failure to recapture the past.

Final Verdict

Whether you choose to enjoy this world of F. Scott Fitzgerald on paper or screen, you will be entertained by a similar storyline. While these movies do have some major differences, they are done to captivate the audience and create a bond between viewers and characters. This classic American novel was written to portray life during a thrilling Jazz Age, introducing readers to rebellious youth, economic prosperity, and jazz music.

It is recommended to read any classic novel prior to enjoying stories on screen. This way, you will have an understanding of what the author intended and will be familiar with characters. While a movie is a faster way to get a main grasp of a theme or story, it does not always include important literary references or quotes. Being a college student you may struggle with writing your essay on the Great Gatsby topics. You may even need professional help from academic writing services like CustomWritings . A team of experienced essay writers will handle any paper for you from scratch.

A Comparative Analysis of "The Great Gatsby": Book vs. Movie

Category: Entertainment , Literature
Topic: The Great Gatsby

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