The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece is a story that could only have taken place in the Jazz Age: an era in which recklessness with money, liquor, women and fast cars pervaded the American consciousness of the 20s. Toby Stephens plays Jay Gatsby, the dashing, enigmatic millionaire enamoured with the elusive and spoiled Daisy Buchanan (Mira Sorvino), a woman he met five years earlier, before World War I drew them apart. Gatsby is a Midwesterner by birth who re-invents himself as a gentleman after acquiring wealth through illegal means. Gatsby woos Daisy via her naive cousin and the narrator of the story, Nick Carraway (Paul Rudd), who gets caught up in Gatsby’s world whilst a friend of Daisy’s romances him. Meanwhile Daisy is miserable, having married Tom Buchanan (Martin Donovan), a moneyed man of status and power but a snobbish and bigoted bore. Made for television, this is the fourth adaptation of Fitzgerald’s celebrated novel about dashed hopes and the demise of the American dream.