So wow! What an interesting movie! The cinematography was a bit cartoonish and unreal (I saw the 3D version, maybe that emphasized it), but the director certainly got the desperate celebration and excess down. The relationship between Gatsby and Daisy was poignant and tender. Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio did an excellent job of that. Daisy’s letdown was mysterious and dark, but not too much, just shadowing Zelda’s future mental state. The depiction of the book was very true, which is always a recommend for me. I hate when they change the ending, or the characters.

Some of my favorite quotes from the movie (directly from the book):

“All the bright precious things fade so fast … and they don’t come back.” Daisy.

“Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” Jay Gatsby.

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Gatsby’s dying fall is very elegantly portrayed and (spoiler here, sorry) I mean the fall of his dreams of a life with Daisy and his fall from a gunshot into the pool.

Did I get sucked in (again)? Yes! I did find myself rooting for the love relationship over the relationship of convenience Daisy had with her husband Tom. And, feeling distressed over Daisy’s vacillation over committing to Gatsby and the deep love she professed to feel and the unknown against the comfort of a secure future with her husband. The following quote sums up her final decision:

“They were careless people. Tom and Daisy –they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Do you have a favorite quote from The Great Gatsby? How does it make you feel about your own life?