5. The Ending
The last 5 minutes of the movie are gorgeous. Caraway slowly walking through the haunted remnants of Gatsby's world. The beautiful poignancy as Caraway steps out onto the dock at West Egg one last time. The ghostly specter of Gatsby turning around to give him (and us) that charming, hopeful smile one last time. The blinking green light that gleams through the fog to remind us of the power of an illusion. Most brilliant of all, a charming little touch that really encapsulates the point of the novel in one brief, beautiful stroke. Caraway finishes his grand novel, closes the book, and titles it simply, "Gatsby." But looking at it for a moment, he, like us, realizes that the name alone doesn't do justice for a man who went through so much to achieve so little. He then scrawls the words "The Great," and the full title, The Great Gatsby, is revealed to us with profound new depth. It's just a brief moment, and it wasn't in the book, but it really does so much to show you what Gatsby meant to Carraway. After reading the book, I always assumed that the title was meant to be seen in a sad, ironic way, emphasizing Gatsby's attempts at achieving greatness, but an ultimate failure to do so. Because of the movie's ending I now look at Gatsby's greatness as Carraway does - not as an ironic statement, but an honest expression. On a meta level it's entirely sensible that the title of Caraway's memoir would be the same as Fitzgerald's novel. I would say that Fitzgerald himself always intended the book's title to reflect this idea, except that Fitzgerald wasn't actually very fond of the title. He tried to change it several times before the book was published. Therefore I don't think Fitzgerald would have given much thought to why Carraway, his fictional counterpart, gave his memoir a name that the real author didn't even like. It's ironic that Fitzgerald never saw the inherent worth of the title, because Luhrmann saw right through to the core. Caraway's addendum is a little flourish, tiny on the surface but great in its depth. It's one of those rare moments where a filmmaker makes a change that actually improves upon the original content - brilliant enough that, were Fitzgerald alive, I dare say he might have wished to add in the little detail himself. So those were the 5 changes that adjusted the narrative with success. The following 5 changes did not...