Archive | Book Matters

Chasing Green Lights (‘Gatsby’ on Film)

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hallowed classic about a self-made tycoon and his long-lost love. Like the green light famously tantalizing its protagonist, Gatsby has proven irresistible to filmmakers, who keep adapting it to the screen but never capture its allure. Why can’t cinema get this novel right? And, perhaps more intriguingly, why does it keep trying?

The answers may lie in the book itself. Published in 1925, it was initially deemed a failure, garnering mixed reviews and selling only 20,000 copies. Though now celebrated as The Great American Novel, it didn’t experience a resurgence until World War II, when it resonated with a nation clinging to its myths in the shadow of international threats. Fitzgerald himself was a bit like Jay Gatsby, dying in 1940 with a tarnished legacy that had to be restored by adherents not unlike narrator Nick Carraway. For that matter, the book itself–a reverie of furs, sleek cars, jazz, and prettily phrased quasi-revelations (reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope)–also could be described as a Jay Gatsby, a barrage of smoke and gilt-framed mirrors that buys so completely into its hype that we buy it as well. Excessive, earnest, and, yes, a tad hollow, Gatsby is a profoundly American story, with flaws–vanities as well as cardboard romances–that loom far larger on a big screen. But it is also the quintessential rags-to-riches tale, so it remains the stuff of which Hollywood dreams are made. Continue Reading →

‘Effie Gray’: An Unlikely Disappointment

“Effie Gray,” about the young wife of premier Victorian art critic John Ruskin, is an unlikely disappointment. Set against the unfettered backdrop of eighteenth-century Scotland, England, and Venice, it is written by Emma Thompson, who has a proven track record of penning slyly feminist screenplays (“Wit,” “Sense and Sensibility”), and it boasts all the ingredients of a female-empowering bodice-ripper: stifling family dysfunction, sexual liberation, a lurid love triangle. Yet this too-delicate biopic never develops the spine nor sparkle for which its titular character is celebrated.

A woefully miscast Dakota Fanning doesn’t help. Decked out in bosom-baring gowns, a mane of auburn waves, and a faint approximation of a British accent, she plays Euphemia “Effie” Gray, a Scottish lass of modest means who was raised in the house where Ruskin’s grandfather committed suicide. John (Greg Wise, as dour here as the real-life Ruskin appears in portraits) was so besotted that he wrote the novel The King of the Golden River for her when she was twelve years old. Yet when they wed eight years later, their marriage was never consummated for reasons that are still debated today. Continue Reading →

Boxing Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein was the world’s first female self-made millionaire. She commissioned portraits from artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol, and she hobnobbed with the likes of Coco Chanel, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, Audrey Hepburn, Colette, and James Joyce. She was a legendarily generous philanthropist and collector who trumpeted East Asian, South American, and African art decades before her peers, and who took a bag lunch to work every day. She was a four-foot-ten, painfully shy Polish girl from a poor Jewish family who, at age thirty, fled to Australia to avoid an arranged marriage – and went on to marry a bona-fide prince twenty-three years her junior after she’d made her fortune as the first cosmetics magnate. Add in the fact that she popularized bright-red lipstick (a hallowed achievement unto itself), and there are no two ways about it: Helena Rubinstein was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.

Yet, since her death fifty years ago this week (she lived to age ninety-two), Rubinstein’s legacy has faded. Her once-powerful beauty company has changed hands twice and is now an ugly stepchild of L’Oreal. Her salons, once considered glamour incarnate, have closed their doors. Ask a person under forty who she was, and chances are good that they’ll draw a blank. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy