Adapting high literature for the screen comes with a barrage of challenges, not the least of which is appeasing the pseudo-intellectual English majors who will automatically snub the film upon merely hearing of its existence. But great books are especially tricky to turn into great movies even when you take the snobs out of the picture. How do you transform great writing, so much of which depends on well-crafted prose and deeply internal narration? You can't just slap voice-over on top of bare reimaginings of classic scenes or you'll get a clumsy, disjointed mess that only kind of makes sense to people who have read the book--and even then, it'll make them wish they had just saved the price of the movie ticket. You've got to create a wholly independent and quality piece of cinema drawn from the original text that will do justice to the book's tones and themes without being a lazily-condensed cluster of imagery and forced dialogue. 

Talented directors have been known to adapt novels with fantastic results. Just watch A Clockwork Orange; it's uniquely Kubrick, even though it preserves many of the book's most important points. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy succeeds similarly, with individual cinematic flair layered atop a modified version of the original story. It's a hard line to tread, but when it's done well, it can result in some of the best films to date. 

I am a little perplexed, though, by another attempt at The Great Gatsby. The story's been hacked at a few times in the past, but it's never really done justice to F. Scott Fitzgerald's American classic. You'd think it'd be a fairly filmable work; after all, it's about pretty people having problems, a subject matter that makes up 80% of American cinema. And Fitzgerald's not exactly Faulkner; his narratives and imagery are pretty cut and dry. Some of his prose is a little purple, but that's how you know to leave it out of the finished screenplay. So why hasn't it worked as a film in the past? Well, the story's arc doesn't fit very well into the traditional two-hour time slot, which is why it worked better on the small screen. And the casting's always been a little wonky; Fitzgerald's characters aren't difficult, but they are particular. But mostly, the previous attempts were filled with the stuffiness that films tend to get when they're entirely aware that they're based off of a "great" work. It's easy to ladle pretension onto a historical drama, but it's not a good idea; the story ought to be the defining factor, not the reputation.

Gatsby's a weird, uncomfortable book and it deserves a film treatment that's not boring. This time around, the director might just be the right man for the job. Baz Luhrmann is a master of the tacky quirk, the ridiculous camp that powered his Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! He's almost too much to take--which is precisely how I feel about Fitzgerald and his literary crown jewel. Gatsby is about the downfall of ridiculous people. Luhrmann is all too good at depicting people at their most ridiculous. Maybe he won't do justice to the original work, but by God, at least it won't be stodgy.

The Great Gatsby will be out in 2012. It'll star Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan. The first two were recently spotted out and about in a period car during shooting. Check out the full set of images over at comingsoon.net.