Nick and Gatsby miscast

I agree quite a bit with you on this, and none of us agree on everything of course.

Tobey Maguire seems to have a genuine quality to his acting, but not that much natural (or trained) ability to transform to a character much different than his own persona. Those actors can be very entertaining and sometimes very affective, such as Clint Eastwood or John Malkovich; no matter how much of a difference there is between the characters they play, they keep us engaged but they're always Clint and John. There are many others-- not the chameleon type that get my highest respect (like Gary Oldman, who with a slight change of speech becomes somebody different, even Dracula)... but rather a familiar person who we simply like to listen to. I don't want that "familiar" type to play anything from a book as dreamy as "The Great Gatsby".

So yeah... Tobey sounded like a good idea to me at first, or at least I uttered "Oh... he's going to play Caraway? That could work, knowing that character's innocence-overwhelmed-by-N.Y. position." But as soon as Tobey opened his mouth I started to look for caffeine and once again was annoyed as I was listening to his Peter Parker, a comic book character known to be technically a geek but a sharp-witted, lean, brooding one at that. Not a dopey nerd with good grades, all torso and nonexistent facial bones. Your "gosh-gee-whiz" wide-eyed description is very similar to what I've written about him on youtube, etc... and I got scolded by many fans that simply like him or have the now-hip crush on his type. Non of the arguers told me WHY he was good as Parker... just that he was good. They just like him and would support Maguire if he played Hitler.

Since Fitzgerald gives detail about everything, with efficiency but plenty enough to give us images, I don't ever think it's good enough to have someone "pull it off" with great acting if they still don't have the right look. Sometimes it's hard to believe the characters in Fitzgerald's book weren't real people. In the looks department, I didn't have too much trouble with the cast, but Jordan Baker was dead wrong. I was expecting someone with a much more natural and outdoorsy physical appeal, knowing her profession, thinks of herself as fun but is ultimately a snob.

DiCaprio surprised me by actually giving me a Gatsby I cared for, so I have a different taste than you there, but I may be biased because I relate so much to the Gatsby character from the book. I read another commenter writing that DiCaprio made him actually root for the Buchanon character. Sometimes Leo can be "that same kid" or annoying, but he was certainly good enough this time to help me hate Buchanon in the film.

The whole point of the Gatsby character, in the book and I thought somewhat in the movie, was seeing somebody refuse the plan he was born into, the class he would have been expected to live in, by any means necessary. After he met Daisy, that drive was even stronger, only to be screwed by his mentor's family and by war. It's so incredibly unfair compared to the life of a Tom Buchanon; a situation known all too well by many of us out there. The tragic part isn't only his being shot down, wrongly accused, but that Daisy, obviously in love with him before the war, snapping back to the brainwashing of the privileged claimed by Tom and his B.S. implications about some vague superiority by being born into it. That bloodlines make him better. The oldest myth in humanity.

Of course you don't need that history lesson but I summed it to point out that DiCaprio, Mulligan, and Edgarton make some of that actually work. I blame the director for some of when it doesn't work. The times when Gatsby is driving and breezing through his accomplishments is one of several examples of when the film makers seemed to forget the atmosphere of the book. At no time have I ever read Fitzgerald's words and felt anything being rushed, slick, dizzying, or glimmering. There are details of wealth, parties that look huge in my imagination, but never does any of it feel shoved together and flashy like some of Luhrmann's film. The modern sounds in the music? I try to forget I heard it. What an insult. Plenty other stories are out there that they can customize for the impatient, disconnected audiences of today. They shouldn't mutilate "The Great Gatsby", a literary monument that takes place in a decade so famous it can count as it's own character. It needs nothing from another time.