Details
Movie Description
Superb dialogue and the use of dreamy scene overlaps and flashbacks mark this gorgeous, deceptively simple, and quietly intense A&E original movie adaptation of THE GREAT GATSBY. F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of the Jazz Age begins in the summer of 1922, when honest, mild-mannered Nick Carraway moves from Chicago to Long Island to learn the bond trade. Nick lives in a bungalow in West Egg, the Nouveau Riche area where the wealthy, mysterious, party-loving Jay Gatsby lives in his sprawling mansion. Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her brutish husband, Tom, live in the more coveted East Egg, where Daisy's fun-loving girlhood friend Jordan is staying with them. While Tom has a married girlfriend on the side, it is also soon revealed that Daisy has a past with the infamous Gatsby, whose love she once rejected because of his formerly low status. Nick reluctantly agrees to reunite Daisy and Gatsby but, before he knows it, he finds himself drawn into a world of heavy drinking, infidelity, dishonesty amid hints of a seedy underworld. Truer to the novel than any other film adaptation, this version of THE GREAT GATSBY beautifully and dramatically weaves a tangled web of wealth and entitlement, love and longing, brutality and apathy.
Synopsis
Oscar winner Mira Sorvino (MIGHTY APHRODITE) and Toby Stephens (SPACE COWBOYS) star in an A&E original movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic novel about an underprivileged Long Island, New York, man who is thrust into a life of power and prosperity through his relationship with Daisy, the affluent girl he has desired for nearly all his life. The film, set in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, chronicles Gatsby's determined rise and colossal fall in narration by Daisy's cousin Nick (Paul Rudd, THE CIDER HOUSE RULES) as an unbiased observer.
Film Notes
DVD Features:
Region 1
Keep Case
Full Frame - 1.33
Additional Release Material:
Documentary - A&E BIOGRAPHY: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Interactive Features:
Interactive Menus
Scene Selections
Television release: January 14, 2001 (A&E Network).
Filmed entirely in Montreal, Canada.
The novel on which the film was based is considered the quintessential representation of the Jazz Age and its social atmosphere.
Fitzgerald, who lived as an expatriate in Paris with other authors like Ernest Hemingway, became known as the voice of the Lost Generation of the 1920s.
Fitzgerald became Hemingway's literary advisor and agent for four years, encouraging him to develop his original style and technique. Hemingway published some of his greatest works during this time, including THE SUN ALSO RISES. But their relationship was often competitive and combative.
When Hemingway received Fitzgerald's nine-page critique of A FAREWELL TO ARMS, he responded by scribbling "Kiss my ass, EH" at the bottom of the document and sending it right back to him.
West Egg, where Gatsby and Nick live on the North Shore of Long Island, is actually Kings Point in Great Neck; East Egg is Sands Point in Port Washington. Both peninsulas jut out into the Long Island Sound.
The house where Daisy and Tom live in the story actually exists in Sands Point to this day. A light can in fact be seen across the water from "West Egg," and one on that bank from "East Egg" as well.
Quotations
"That's what I get for marrying a brute. A great big hulking specimen of a man."--Daisy about Tom
"I hate the word 'hulking.'"--Tom
"I've been drunk a week and I thought a library might sober me up."--Party Guest at Gatsby's
"Did it help?"--Jordan
"I can't tell you, I've only been here an hour."--Party Guest
"It's the funniest thing, ol' sport. I can't, I can't."--Gatsby (stuttering and laughing with joy to Nick about seeing Daisy again)
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