Lindsey Lowson / 01 June 2025 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

Gatsby remake of the 1974 Robert Redford Mia Farrow Epic

With music by Jay Z

When this movie Directed by Australian Baz Luhrmann came out 2013 I was excited and wanted to see it.

I have never actually watched the original starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow all the way through, familiar with it only through clips and film trivia and the fact it’s adapted for screen from the giant American novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald covered in English literature classes around the world.

Interestingly at the 1975 academy awards the film won for best costumes and best music, in 2014 the film won for best costumes and best set design, the actors missing out on both occasions.

So I didn’t really know the story when I embarked on the Baz Luhrmann version of events. And it was a sumptuous spectacle of epic proportion for sure. For me the style of the director took over, his signatures that landed so well in the brilliant and widely acclaimed Moulin Rouge didn’t quite hit the mark in Gatsby perhaps why the reviews weren’t as positive from the critics as everyone expected at the release and why it’s taken me 10 years to actually watch it.

So Gatsby played by Leonardi Di Caprio who I now struggle to watch anyway because of all the negative press true or not around his personal life is a mysterious billionaire looking to recreate the past by throwing lavish parties in the hope of attracting his lost love Daisy Buchanan now married and miserable living across the bay.

Set in 1922 the film loosely touches on the times, post First World War, the stock market, Nick Carroway who narrates the story played by Toby Maquire is the cousin of Daisy Buchanan, starting a career on Wall St as a bond trader and somehow finds himself renting a small house for the summer right next door to Jay Gatsby.

He’s a pawn in the story, Gatsby’s overall plan to be reunited with Daisy and Nick Carraway is inadvertently the key.

The story begins with Nick in a sanitarium talking to an analyst. he’s suffering with anxiety, depression, insomnia, alcoholism as he recounts the events that have led him to this place.

It is a dark tale set in ultimate glamour. I digress but I recently watched a documentary about P Diddy and his infamous white parties in the Hamptons and I thought this is the exact same story except that one is fiction

Lots of people said the music was wrong, I disagree the music wasn’t the problem I think it was just all too much, and the actors couldn’t draw us in. Gatsby and Daisy Carey Mulligan somehow just weren’t believable, her seeming more spoilt and unhappy than anything else, almost powerless in the film something I’d never thought I say about Mulligan who hasn’t yet won an Oscar but has been nominated 3 times for her break out role 2009 in An Education and then for Promising Young Woman and Maestro in 2023 where she played Felicia Montealegre in the biographical romantic drama.

No problem with the host of talent on this project I think it was just all too much. And maybe it was just Leonardo Di Caprio who couldn’t capture the subtlety of Gatsby, he just couldn’t make us like him which I think is important for the story.

He kinda comes off as the bad guy when he’s not supposed to be (even though he is technically)

I think a young audience would be bored and an older crowd who like a classic would think what is this?

Yep it’s one to think about. I don’t really know if I liked it or not.

Would I watch it again. probably not but I am interested now in watching the original to draw a comparison.