Watched The Great Gatsby on HBO last night. It threw me off my seat at first because it seemed to have been conceived as a music video. That was because I wasn't expecting a treatment that would constantly remind me that I wasn't in the 1920s. It is, nonetheless, a gem--a wonderful example of cinematic alienation and anti-suspension-of-disbelief.

The only miscast performer, I felt, was Tobey Maguire. When he first appeared on the screen I thought that I was watching another sequel to Spiderman. He plays the narrator, the fantasy Fitzgerald, but, despite his being a writer in this film, he was too naive and came across as being more uneducated than Gatsby himself. A narrator represents the collective wisdom of the characters. After all even the narrator of Catcher in the Rye, despite that novel's profusion of immaturity and growing pains, rose high above his own milieu.