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Wednesday
Jan082014

Clayton: The Great Gatsby (1974)

Jack Clayton’s version of The Great Gatsby downplays the thrills and excesses of the Jazz Age to focus on the novel’s quietest moments – the moments when Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) contemplates Gatsby (Robert Redford), or tries to imagine what Gatsby himself might be contemplating. It’s shot through with the  hushed naturalism of 70s Hollywood – the perfect register for a narrator who’s always just on the threshold of things, within and without, as Clayton collapses the whispered conversations and breathy voiceover of Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplay into a continual semi-interior monologue, in which Nick’s never quite sure if he’s experiencing Gatsby’s thoughts or his own. That’s the perfect register, too, for Redford’s presence – for the first half of the film, we only see him in silhouette, a shadow against a series of gorgeous Long Island compositions, collapsed into a series of spaces whose sentience muffle and mute the camera as it moves through them. In other words, it’s suffused with the same melancholy atmospherics as the greatest 70s surveillance dramas – Redford’s next role was in Three Days of the Condor – overseen by Gatsby’s panoptic, scrutinisng gaze, a watchful eye that never quite discloses what it’s yearning for. And that means that everything already feels eroded and somewhat evaporated by Gatsby’s eye – nearly every scene is shot in hyberbolic, iridescent soft-focus, silence made visible, to the point where the camera seems capable of extracting moisture from anything, covering any object with a fine sheen of bejewelled sweat. In the process, the narrative becomes almost extraneous, but it’s at those moments that Clayton’s vision matches Gatsby’s aestheticism, and especially his exquisite Long Island pastoral – if it’s not quite true to his vision as a novelist, it’s eminently true to his aptitude as a prose poet. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Daisy (Mia Farrow) ruptures this diaphanous naturalism so violently – where Waterston and Redford are so ambient they’re almost the same person, Farrow plays it as high melodrama, ripping through Clayton’s crinoline camera with a “vast carelessness” that single-handedly restores the anarchy of the Jazz Age to the mise-en-scene. But it just means that Clayton is as ambivalent about Daisy as the novel, a gesture that seems to have angered some critics at the time, but in retrospect is precisely what prevents the film from sinking flaccidly into Gatsby's fantasies – what keeps us poised at the very threshold of things, within and without.

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