3. Tobey Maguire
While Leo DiCaprio is intoxicating as Gatsby, his foil, Nick Carraway is far less successful, thanks to the understated and not wholly successful performance of Tobey Maguire. Unfortunately for Maguire, he is once more hamstrung by a feeling that he doesn't quite fit. He plays the slightly vulnerable outsider with a distinctly vanilla flavour well, though his innocent, artistic filter isn't quite as successful or as engaging as that presented by Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge, but when it comes to the more turbulent side of the story, Maguire feels a little miscast. It is obvious that throwing in too many alpha male presences alongside DiCaprio's Gatsby and Joel Edgerton's Buchanan might have resulted in a trade-off in the impact of that particular dynamic, but in comparison, Maguire feels utterly immasculated, leading to his fading into the background for a good portion of the film's midsection. His characterisation may stay true to the source, but to have the narrator feel so absent and so impotent for so much of the most important part of the film is an odd, and rather jarring experience.