The Dreariness of Sanctity

How does one film The Great Gatsby?

With a great deal of care and reverence, I suppose.

Certainly, the Jack Clayton 1974 version – Hollywood’s third attempt to depict arguably the greatest American novel ever written – is filmmaking with the sort of attention to detail and seriousness usually reserved for a religious ritual.

And yes, like most actual religious functions, this effort is far too somber and particular to ever really entertain or convey anything like sentiment. Adaptation is never an easy art to pull off, of course, and the old adage that great books make lousy movies and lousy books make great movies is never truer than it is here. Standout performances from Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, both of whom seemed born to play Gatsby and Daisy, cannot save what one critic quipped is a film “as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

The strangeness of the failure is even more acute when one realizes that both Francis Ford Coppola and Vladimir Nabakov – the latter no slouch at writing novels – worked on the screenplay, a screenplay which on the page, probably sang with passion. The scenes themselves, especially that first grandiose party at Gatsby’s waterfront abode, also look spectacular enough to get the heart pounding and the head hoping that what we are about to see will equal the power and the pitfalls of the novel. But sadly the aesthetics and the integrity of the plot are all that is on offer here. The movie just does not hum along the way the book does and scenes that are meant to be emotional, especially the tragic ones, play out flat and boring, as if conveyed by the robotics of rote memorization.

That the book is far more complicated and less clean than filmmakers and high school English teachers think no doubt also plays havoc on this adaptation. For what is Fitzgerald after in the novel? Many would say it is about money not being everything, an oblique reference to Fitzgerald’s “the rich are not like you and me” quote, which is so often taken out of context as to entirely lose its meaning. Certainly, Redford, with his shirts from Turbell & Asher and his French champagne and fake Oxford degree is not like his contemporaries, something both the novel and the film make clear once he is dead and there is almost no one at his funeral, save Nick Carraway. But is the book – and therefore, the film adaptation here – really so simple? 

Certainly, I did not think so the second time I read the novel, nor the third.

Rather than bore my handful of readers with literary analysis, I will simply offer the following. Gatsby and Nick’s intertwined searches for the self are entirely that: Searches for the self. Gatsby attempted to remake himself because he never knew who he was in the first place and was not sure what he wanted to become. This is the glory and the rootlessness of egalitarian America, where you are not what your parents were and are not confined by where you came from (unlike Europe, for example). You must then invent yourself – and this can take a lifetime, and even longer still, and the worst part of it is, you may never reach a satisfactory result. Certainly, Gatsby did not.

Gatsby chooses Tom and Daisy’s crude and boorish model of success as his lamppost because he wanted Daisy to be his and not Tom’s. What he really wants is a past that he could not recapture and a future based on an alternate past that never unfolded. He does not learn that you are not entirely what others think of you. Worse, if you do not know yourself, truly know yourself, then no party can ever be big enough, no lie convincing enough.

Gatsby is a muddled, shook-up man who likely knows less about himself at the end than he did at the beginning.  Only Nick grows, but even he is paralyzed by his own uncertainty about his own identity to do or say much throughout the plot’s events, which is precisely why he is a great narrator, but near-awful protagonist. He cannot break away from Tom and Daisy until it is too late and he cannot help save Gatsby from himself. The plot itself is about a great many things, wealth, discovery, the American dream, the hollowness of that dream, relationships, love, nostalgia, maturation, lost innocence. I could go on, because it is all there, and what we are dealing with is decisively deadly in the way a tight Shakespearean tragedy is.

Funny thing about the old Bard, he does not film well, either.

My suspicion is these texts matter too much to the people who found some or all of the richness in them and that this affinity prevents these adaptors from the level of interpretation and confinement necessary for two and half hours of film. In that sense, The Great Gatsby, is a beautiful but mediocre film, one that becomes interesting only when we watch it for what it is not. In other words, no matter how earnest the acolyte, he or she cannot conjure up the same magic as the prophet who inspired them, and in the case of this film, what we have is a rather unintentional examination of failing to achieve the sort of legitimate greatness the title character himself vainly sought in the pages of a century-old novel.

Call Them Irresponsible

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a lightning-strike film.

I say this because without the electrified chemistry between leads Paul Newman and Robert Redford the picture would not have succeeded at the box office, nor would we remember it today as a classic example of Americana. Irreverent, rambunctious and largely devoted to a commonplace, jocular and mutually debasing form of male friendship – call it “buddy-ism,” if you will – the movie is a failure in everything other than the intangibles associated with its unique and irrepressible tone.

This judgment might seem harsh, until one scratches the surface of what is ultimately a very superficial film. I mean, for starters, it is not much of a Western. Or at least, we can think of several better Westerns from the same time period without much effort. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, to name just one titan, is released less than 365 days before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is released the exact same year. In the case of the Leone outing, the plot is intricate and bloody journey through the American West and the triumphs and tragedies of the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Peckinpah’s similarly impressive effort is violent ode to the impossibility of outrunning the emerging tropes of change. In stark contrast, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is essentially a light-hearted “chase” movie, in which Newman and Redford offer up some entertaining banter as they run and run and run…

Odd interludes – and here I am thinking precisely of Newman’s bicycle jaunt with the always appreciated Katharine Ross – and the enjoyable – if somewhat out of place – Burt Bacharach soundtrack attempt to fill the ample space left by the over-simple plot, but even these cannot rescue what I believe is a clever work of whimsy. Not bold enough to be a Western, not quite funny enough to be a comedy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid defies definition and simply exists. None of which changes the undeniable fact the film was a runaway success when it debuted in 1969 and has since been preserved as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by no less an authority than the U.S. Library of Congress. However, I would argue these accolades say more about the American filmgoer than they do about the film itself. Accordingly, the key to understand the success of this picture lies in understanding what it represented for the audiences who embraced it.

Put simply, this film connected with people in 1969 similar to the way The Graduate did a few years prior. The reason both films resonated has to do with what many crudely like to call “counter-culture,” a vulgar and largely inaccurate catch-all which I will now attempt to rhetorically distance myself from, even as I unavoidably rely on what the term means to most readers. Released during a time when very serious men in crew-cuts landed on the moon and some other very serious men in crew-cuts continued to fight an escalating battle in Vietnam, Butch and Sundance – like Dustin Hoffman’s character before them – are distinctly confused and unserious in their enterprises. It is this lack of focus, this distinct uncertainty about life and one’s place in it that makes all three characters immediately accessible to moviegoers in the late 1960s – and today.

Something about Butch and Sundance’s attitude toward life feels right, given the serious of everything going on around their characters and the corresponding seriousness that accompanies the individual audience member whenever they view the picture. Unfortunately, there is little else to hold onto in the film other than this “feeling,” however vague it may be. Logically speaking, the film is a mess and the careful viewer can never really figure out what is happening, let alone take away any coherent purpose or message from the film’s events.

To hard back to another 60s classic, one which I have already reviewed, Bonnie and Clyde is a fascinating exploration of the links between sex and violence and how the display of physical power can equal titillation and ultimately satisfaction. The crimes committed in that film serve as the window through which the audience assesses the titular characters bizarre – and largely sexless – relationship. Something like this is occurring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but the metaphor is much less focused and much more difficult to discern. Butch and Sundance are friends, but what that means in the context of a film in which neither man seems to care about much of anything is the enigma behind the “feeling” we get from their warm camaraderie. 

Butch is presented as the thinker, Sundance as the man of action. What holds the two opposites together is their mutual disdain for work and their liking of an easy and carefree life of robbery. Neither fancy attachments of any sort, though both seem attached to each other, even if they would never admit it. Their treatment of Katharine Ross is particularly revealing. On the face of things, she is Sundance’s girlfriend, but she just as easily could be Butch’s – and the impression we are left to gather from this is that the romantic relationship is accidental and Sundance probably would not mind if she suddenly started sleeping with his partner. As the film winds down, Ross announces she is leaving the two men because, ominously, she fears they will meet a bad end. Neither raises the slightest objection to her departure and her Sybil-like warning is equally shrugged off by the two men.

This casual carelessness extends to nearly every other facet of the men’s lives. Both regularly lose nearly all the money they make in their robbery and neither seems to have any inclination toward a higher principle. They stop short of villainy because they are not killers – in one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Butch proclaims he has never killed anyone – and they go out of their way, Robin Hood-like not to harm anyone they come across in their life of crime (quite the opposite of Bonnie and Clyde). This is meant to demonstrate their carefree and friendly attitude, but by end of the film, both have killed a great many people and they have shifted from robbing the ill-gotten fortunes of railway barons to stealing the meager fruit of the Bolivian peasantry’s hard labor. This hardly seems winsome.

Unlike The Graduate, in which Hoffman’s character becomes somewhat self-aware and rejects the booze-soaked world of his parents, Butch and Sundance remain oblivious to their inherit shallowness and they seem no wiser at the end than they were in the beginning. Indeed, the ill-fated decision to go to Bolivia is undertaken because the country is something so utterly foreign as to be mythical to the two men. As an audience, what we are witnessing here are the dreams of children – not mature men, who care or understand that everything positive in the world is built on responsibility, sacrifice and integrity. When the pair charge from their hiding place at the film’s conclusion, we are meant to see their off-screen destruction by a hail of bullets as the inevitable and tragic end of iconoclasts. 

The only problem is the moment feels as empty and haphazard as the rest of the film. Butch and Sundance die because the law finally caught up with them, not because their “way of life” became anachronistic or their social deviance – robbery and murder – was no longer tolerated. Charming as the pair are, they lived like brigands and died like brigands. Period. Exactly what we are supposed to take away from their lives, beyond some crude combination of the 60s’ nebulous “fight the power” and “go your own way” motifs, is never clear. But make no mistake, this is a picture whose star power is bright enough to hide these flaws, hence its unchallenged status.   

Condor Fails to Fly High Enough

Sometimes, it is difficult to watch classic films and recognize what made them classic. Other times, it is just impossible. The distance from the release date is too great, the world too different.

Three Days of the Condor, a Sidney Pollack film starring Robert Redford is routinely referred to as a classic spy thriller – or, at the very least, a pretty good example of the conspiracy-driven films that bubbled up in the mid to late 1970s. The problem is these kinds of films do not affect contemporary film-goers the way they did their original audiences: It is no longer shocking, for example, to learn that the government lies and sometimes does things it should not (see All the President’s Men).

For my money, films like Three Days of the Condor work better as indicators of an era – examples of mindsets and of attitudes, etc. – than as pieces of timeless drama. That is not to say the constituent parts of this film are not any good. The direction and acting here are superb and the film should work – and therefore age – better than it does. Exactly why it falters rests on the not-so-subtle message I believe the filmmakers wanted to impart to audiences.

When we first meet Redford, a man well known for his off-screen messaging, he is a CIA open source analyst in New York who scours books written in foreign languages looking for patterns or ideas. It is not exactly exciting stuff, until he goes to get lunch one day and comes back to find all of his colleagues dead. When he calls Langley to try to figure out what happened, Langley sends someone to kill him. Redford then adopts the tried and true movie and television-mantra of trust no one and stay on the move until you figure out just what the heck is happening (the Jason Bourne franchise did precisely this for three films).

Along the way, Redford picks up Faye Dunaway, the woman destined by the script to find his newfound vulnerability strangely enduring. It would be unfair to criticize Dunaway for this. She brings real emotive power to her scenes, even if nearly all of them are completely unnecessary to the plot. Her performance manages to grab hold of just the right amount of denial and acceptance in her interactions with Redford – and she can also be funny, such as when she jokes about being a “spy fucker,” a line I took as a sharp jab at the arm-candy that is ever-present in other spy films.

That line, however, is about irreverent as the film gets.

The majority of the time is spent in an earnest game of dodge-the-assassin. And the buildup concerning the mystery about what Redford knows, why his colleagues were killed and exactly who it is who may be trying to kill him – maybe there is a CIA within the CIA, he muses – is all done with serious and skillful vigor. Unfortunately, the tension inherent in these questions never really goes anywhere. Worse, we never can feel like Redford is in any danger. He is unquestionably the cleverest person on the screen, and despite being an analyst who read books for a living, he manages to sidestep all of the deadly operatives sent after him.

Whatever promise the film contains evaporates in the final 15 minutes, wherein instead of the revelatory finale we have been building toward, we are given a rather prosaic confession in a mahogany study – and can anyone really say for certain what the confessed “plot” really was? – and the film’s hitherto lethal antagonist gives up his aggression toward Redford, thanks to a new financial arrangement with CIA that the film’s creators probably reckoned was both original and disturbingly amoral. They are completely wrong on the first account, but closer on the second. The assassin’s steely description his dedication to a code of non-allegiance that rests entirely on caring only for his own professional exactitude as a killer is indeed chilling.

But it is Redford’s code we are supposed to care about, and so far as I can tell, he really does not have one. His transformation from the type of man who would join the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 60s or early 70s (the climax of Vietnam anyone?) to someone who would go to the New York Times to expose Agency wrongdoing does not feel legitimate.

The phony transformation is perhaps most clear when Redford, who almost appears to have quit acting in the final scenes of the film and inserted his actual personality and politics into the picture, loudly voices his disdain for the Agency by calling its employees “you people” – a sophomoric rebuke that conveniently forgets, of course, that his character is indeed one of those “people,” too.

Pollack and Redford would both go on to make better films that said more interesting things in less obvious ways. But even if we set aside the obvious politicking, the film struggles to work within its own genre, thanks to a few too many unbelievable scenes, a bizarre and unnecessary love story and a plot that never really fulfills its promise. A fair criticism, which I believe can almost be said about any 70s genre picture, is that Three Days of the Condor is essentially a terrific B-movie elevated by an A-list cast.