"You can't relive the past."

Nor can you remake the novel. This was rough. 

(What makes me an authority, you ask? I read the novel at least once every year, and I am a teriffic film critic.)

The hip hop soundtrack pissed plenty of people off, but not me. I guess rap is to today what jazz was to the 20s, so I'm fine with that. This was fun movie to look at, especially the Brooks Brothers men's apparel. The Manhattan and Long Island party scenes - and the car rides there - were also well done, a bit over-the-top, but I guess they had to be.

DiCaprio was a good, not great, Gatsby. (Redford was better: more vulnerable.) DiCaprio seemed to affect a British accent on "sport" whenever he said "old sport," which was jarringly often. I did like that he showed a temper and nearly punched Tom in hotel room on the hottest day of the summer. Again, though, DiCaprio's brutal accent work escapes with critical impunity (see Gangs of New York, The Departed, Django Unchained).

Daisy (the chick from An Education) just wasn't desireable enough, defnitely not the golden girl onto whom Gatsby - and Fitzgerald - pins his grotesquely conceited hopes. And what about her soft, disingenuous, full-of-money voice? I know that not everything in the book makes it to the screen, but this was a glaring omission.

Tom was good, smaller than Gatsby, but bristly and fractious and prickish enough. I liked him more and more as the film went on.

Jordan was a non-entity. She has a boyfriend in the film, which makes no real difference ultimately. When we see her for the first time, she is, faithful to the book, sitting on a backless sofa in a stiff, uncomfortable position.

Myrtle is not nearly sensual enough. And I missed the conversation about the first time she met Tom on the train, which I always find to be very funny.

As for Meyer Wolfsheim, he's played by an Indian. Are America's present-day Middle Easterners perceived the way Jews were a century ago? 

Nick Carraway tells his story to a psychotherapist in a sanitarium. Apparently, guarding everyone else's secrets - being "within but without" - has unnerved Nick, now an alcoholic and cathartically writing down his experiences on our slender, riotous island. He completes Gatsby, his manuscript, and at the very end of the film writes "The Great" just above it. I enjoyed this take on Nick, but I wanted to punch Tobey Maguire in the left temple every time he spoke. I figured Nick to be several things: a whiny pussy is not one of them.

This movie would have been alright had it been about a love triangle and a grizzly murder involving the sloppy, irresponsible social elite of 1920s New York and those who aspired to such slop. (It's like how Godfather III was a fine movie, but could never stand up to its older predecessors.) The story is essentially the same as the one you can read, but what makes the novel immortal is the storytelling. The Gatsby on screen just isn't told as well as the book, which is exactly what I figured and why I never planned on seeing this movie. Had this been based on or inspired by Gatsby, it'd be another story. Unfortunately, this movie carries the name of the American novel, and so on the scale of fart sucking, this one sucks a fart as bad as the one that made Rosa throw up in the kitchen sink one morning back in '08.