Toby Stephens is a genuinely talented actor, and it is painful to have to see stuff like this on his CV. He's an excellent Gatsby -- much better than Robert Redford. He really conveyed the not- quite-at-home-in-his-skin quality of Jay Gatsby. Unfortunately, he has to contend with Mira Sorvino, who must surely have watched a lot of Marilyn Monroe films to prepare for the role of Daisy. She's such a dope you just can't quite believe Gatsby would a) fall in love with her in the first place or b), if he did fall in love with her in a fit of youthful stupidity, continue to love her once he met her again. Paul Rudd doesn't amount to much, either. But the truly awful thing is the score. Holy crap. I would rather drive red-hot pokers through my eardrums than listen to that dreck again.

There could at last be a satisfying adaptation of this classic novel of the Jazz Age if the two half-good versions were combined, keeping from each the best. We would keep the sets, costumes, musical score and performances by Sam Waterston, Howard Da Silva and some others from the 1974 mega- production, and from this extremely modest but more literary adaptation, keep Mira Sorvino's Daisy Buchanan, Martin Donovan's Tom and the liberal sprinkling of Scott Fitzgerald's polished prose.As Daisy, a "beautiful little fool", the Harvard educated Ms. Sorvino is not ideal but more convincing than Mia Farrow--who was too English and looked actually old though I understand now she was pregnant, and only 28. The best performance here was by Martin Donovan, familiar to television audiences by face if not by name, and that is the problem. His Tom Buchanan is sensitive and restrained, in fact too sympathetic for the bigoted bully and skirt chaser he is supposed to be portraying. Donovan steals every scene from the inexperienced Toby Stephens and when Daisy is won back, the viewer can believe it is because Tom is really the better man. This totally distorts what author Scott Fitzgerald was saying.Daisy Buchanan stays with Tom because she has chosen respectability over love, making her even more rotten than her husband and quite undeserving of The Great Gatsby.

How can I even begin? ... It sends chills through my spine when I read that human beings actually like this movie over Jack Clayton's movie. My grade 11 English class has spent the last month analyzing F. Scott Fitzgeral's "The Great Gatsby" and the corresponding movie by Jack Clayton. We are 45 minutes into this one and I can already tell it doesn't even compare. The imagery in Clayton's film was so powerfully symbolic. The dog and bird imagery, the garden imagery, Daisy looking like a daisy... It was all just amazing! Not to mention that Clayton followed the plot of F. Scott's novel almost spot on. Markowitz's film? I have seen no real underlying symbolism. I looked and looked but I found none. Also, WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS UP WITH GATSBY GETTING HIS NAME FROM DAISY?!?!? ANYONE WHO HAS READ THE BOOK WILL CLEARLY KNOW THAT JAY GATSBY WAS INVENTED WHEN JAMES GATZ MET DAN CODY! I-I can't even go on... It was just not good... Especially in comparison to Clayton's film. Oh and by-the-way, only someone who has read and studied the book will know that Clayton had also read and studied the book by his film and his overly in-depth movie.

This movie is unbelievably terrible. It butchers the book, inserts random flashbacks for no apparent reason, mixes up events, omits important plot points entirely, and moves at an extremely fast pace.The acting is positively awful. The actors ruin the characters from the book completely, and the actor who plays Gatsby has the worst and most forced smile I've ever seen, old sport.It adds nothing to the original story. It only subtracts from it. If someone decides to see this before reading the book, the confusion will be immense. The movie invents things that don't belong in the story at all.It is not worth seeing, under any circumstances. Avoid it like the plague.