4. The Music
This one's a no-brainer. Many people were skeptical about the film's inclusion of modern-day hip-hop as a replacement for the Jazz music of the roaring 20's (myself included). But NPR put those suspicions to rest when they released the entire soundtrack for streaming, and thousands of listeners got to hear just how genuine the music was going to be. By the time the movie came out, people had been listening to the soundtrack so often that any potentially unpleasant reactions would no longer be a risk. It helps that the songs work just as well in the movie as they do on their own. They're diverse in genre and quality, but each one manages to perfectly capture some distinct aspect of Gatsby's world. It's this ability to stray the path between a modern sound and Jazz Age themes that make the soundtrack a success. Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful" perfectly captures the inherent sadness of Gatsby and Daisy's romance, echoing with the themes of lost love and an unreachable past. The XX's "Together" personifies the finite hollowness of that same romance, its distant beat echoing along with the glowing of Daisy's green light. Jay Z's "$100 bill" immediately represents the sheer excess and superficiality by which Gatsby and his contemporaries lead their lives. And so on and so forth. In a way, hip-hop, with all its emphasis on money, excess, and living large, was the perfect choice to be a musical counterpart to Gatsby's excessive world. Similarly, hip-hop is the modern Jazz, considered extreme and rebellious to the musical status quo, eventually adapted and taken up as the mark of a revolutionary new sound. And they're both frivolous in nature. It may bother the ears of some listeners who were expecting a classic Jazz Age sound, but if the soundtrack had been all Jazz we would essentially be watching a period piece. The story of Gatsby is an ageless one, and it therefore fits that the music of the current age should be perfectly adept at representing its sound, rather than a musical style that shows its age. There are a lot of traditional Jazz sounds in there anyway, so really it's the best of both worlds.