The Great Gatsby Recast
It's for a challenge at picspammy .
You’re going to have to bear with me as I give my explanation ;)
Okay so last week I sat my Higher English exam again - I resat it this year in the hopes of improving last year’s grade - and as a result of sitting it again, I got to study The Great Gatsby again. Now, last year I was also doing A Streetcar Named Desire so naturally (or not so naturally if you’re not me maybe) Gatsby took a backseat because I just preferred Streetcar. So anyway, this year I was told we were studying Gatsby and Death of a Salesman (did not like at all!) so Gatsby became my strongest text this year. The point of this little story is that over the past two years I’ve studied Gatsby and the characters to the point where I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown over symbolism, underlying theme etc :S I’ve grown so attached to this novel that I don’t think any movie adaptation will really live up to it but here are my dream cast anyway.
Strangely, I found the male characters pretty easy to cast (except for Nick, he was a tough one) and the females really difficult - apart from Daisy, she was the first character I did cast.
Not the best graphics but hey, I was doing it it a hurry.
“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”
Nick was one of the hardest for me to cast and I guess that’s because the story is being told through his eyes. He’s not exactly my favourite character but he’s not my least favourite either. He’s just sort of…there. That being said, I think Matt would be brilliant as Nick.
“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."
In spite of his many flaws, Gatsby is certainly my favourite character. He doesn’t give up on his dreams and would do anything for the woman he loves (winding up dead in the process - silly bugger.) Because of the fact that he’s my favourite character, I found it quite difficult to cast him. But James Marsden is such a fabulous actor and I think he could capture the many elements of Gatsby’s character - the good and the bad. Plus, he can play the spurned love interest so well! The Notebook and Superman Returns, anyone? NOW GAZE AT HIS BEAUTY. Ahem.
"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of--" I hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he [Gatsby] said suddenly.
That was it. I had never understood it before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it... High up in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl...”
The easiest person to cast and my least favourite character - ironic? Daisy is naturally beautiful and has an almost angelic look about her yet she is superficial and selfish. Sienna is gorgeous obviously and she can also play the ‘rich bitch’ very well (Stardust, anyone?). She’s definitely my first choice for Daisy.
"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
Tom is a ‘hulking’ brute of a man. He is violent towards his mistress Myrtle and it is suggested that he is also violent towards his wife. Matt Damon was my first choice for Tom because I think he’s got that sort of ‘big’ look about him, plus he’s handsome and I reckon Tom must’ve been the classically handsome sort, even if he was a vile character.
"Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body."
I think I’m one of the few people who actually like Jordan’s character. She’s strong and feisty…and okay, she’s a compulsive liar and a cheat but she’s still the best female character in this bloody book. Anyhoo, Katie is just so pretty and she can pull off ‘sarcastic bitch you hate to love’ really well.
"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman...I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe."
Another character who really annoyed me. She is completely ignorant to the fact that whilst she talks about the ‘lower class’, she is still part of it and she’s a bit thick not to realise that Tom’s just using her for sex and that he’s not actually going to leave his cushy life with his upper class wife for dumpy old her. The thing is though, Gatsby is thick for the exact same reasons, except he expects Daisy to leave Tom, but I still love him to bits. But I digress. Emily is far to gorgeous to be Myrtle IMO but hey, you never know. She is the one I found most difficult to cast. Maybe I only chose Emily because I was watching The Young Victoria today and I had no one else in mind. Who knows?
“This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”
You’ve gotta feel bad for the poor bugger. His wife hates him and is having an affair with a man he’s doing business with. He just wants to live his life with Myrtle and get by with his wee garage but she’s wanting all the glamour of the upper class. Then when she’s killed, he’s got nothing left to live for. So what does he do? Why he does what any other self-respecting (Wilson? Really?) widower does. Goes and shoot the bloke who ‘ran over’ wife then hey, decides to shoot himself too. As for casting Ed Norton…well, it kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? He really does bear an uncanny resemblance to Scott Wilson’s Wilson of the 1974 adaptation.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.