Just taken my son to see the film The Great Gatsby. He thought it was brilliant and realised the ending as tragic and unjust, the sort of storyline you want to rub out and rewrite, a bit like the narrator does at the end.
I remember the original film, the one with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and Farrow irritating the shit out of me but I could never really remember why, I was very young at the time. I didn't realise what I disliked about her character was her cowardice. She was charmed and free spirited and beautiful so it would have been everything I would have aspired to but she was also bred to be weak. I do remember being terribly upset at the tragedy at the end. The pointlessness of it all, and not understanding why it happened. It was an unfairytale. The shallow empty people won and destroyed the naive but ultimately courageous romantics. Now the film is being heralded as a story of our times, a testimony to prove that money doesn't make you happy, it just makes you drunk, needy, cowardly, friendless, empty, shallow, treacherous, weak. I disagree. It makes some people those things. And I think it makes a lot of people very happy, for some of the time anyway. I feel if people have those qualities when they have little or no money or have been born into it, then the neediness, cowardice, emptiness etc..is going to grow. But if they have an ounce of integrity, of courage, of spine, then it doesn't matter. The Great Gatsby makes the wealthy look vacuous and cheap. But then again, so does Made In Chelsea.
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