Fitzgerald story loses something in translation
Every time someone decides to adapt an F. Scott Fitzgerald work for film or television, purists are disappointed. That’s because Fitzgerald is a far more complicated writer than he seems. Just distilling plot is an automatic disservice and missed opportunity. That approach leads only to melodrama without thematic complexity.
That brings us to the latest take on Fitzgerald, Amazon’s sprawling, big-budget adaptation of the author’s unfinished Hollywood novel, generally but incorrectly known as “The Last Tycoon,” whose first season is available Friday, July 28.
For the purists, the Amazon series takes considerable liberties with the novel, which was assembled from notes first in 1941 by Edmund Wilson and then more authentically in 1995 by Matthew J. Bruccoli, who gave the work the title Fitzgerald intended, “The Love of the Last Tycoon.”
Fitzgerald managed only one screen credit as he knocked around Hollywood in the final years of his life trying to earn money to support wife Zelda’s hospitalization back east and to pay college tuition for his daughter, Scottie. He died at 44 in December 1940 at the home of his lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, while making notes on a forthcoming Princeton football game.
Fitzgerald would have liked some of the Amazon “Tycoon’ because he longed to see his name in the credits on the big screen. For a while, at least, he also would have liked Matt Bomer’s embodiment of Monroe Stahr, a latter-day Gatsby who had invented and renamed himself. Stahr is the “golden boy” of
Brady American Pictures, and is based on the real-life Irving Thalberg, who was the boy genius of Louis B. Mayer’s MGM until his death, at 37, in 1936.
Fitzgerald was mesmerized by Thalberg, a man of literate taste, married to singularly classy screen goddess Norma Shearer. He could have been a model for several Fitzgerald heroes who reinvent themselves but are haunted by mortality and that “real dark night of the soul.” Gatsby and Stahr are cut from the same cloth, and mirror how Fitzgerald viewed his own position in life, a Minnesota native who got into Princeton, and found himself among richer, Eastern boys and desperately aspired to be one of them. An important key to understanding a Fitzgerald hero and the author himself is as simple as knowing the working title for his first novel, “The Romantic Egoist.”
Stahr is cultured, suave, always in control of his speech and emotions. He is everything his blustering boss, Pat Brady (Kelsey Grammer), is not. Stahr would never announce he would henceforth do his crossword puzzles on the john when his wife, Rose (Rosemarie DeWitt), wants to convert the parlor into a sick room for a young woman she’s been visiting at the hospital.
As the series begins, Stahr is not only haunted by his own mortality but by the recent death of his beloved wife, Minna Davis. He is determined to celebrate her life in a new film, if only he can find the right girl to play the lead role. He meets her, in true Hollywood fashion, at a diner where she’s working as a waitress. Kathleen Moore (Dominique McElligott), with a charming Irish accent like Minna’s, purports to want nothing to do with the phoniness of Hollywood.
Stahr is smitten for the first time since Minna’s death, and eventually convinces Kathleen that it’s not only because she resembles his late wife.
Meanwhile, we follow other stories in the microcosm that is Brady American Pictures. The boss’ daughter, Celia (Lily Collins), has a crush on Stahr and wants to be taken seriously for that and because she’s convinced she has what it takes to succeed in her father’s business.
A talented screenwriter named Aubrey Hackett (Enzo Cilenti) falls in love with a German cellist named Hannah Taub (Melia Kreiling). Another screenwriter, Wylie White (Dustin Ingram) can’t control his drinking and is broken by the studio system. Other writers are beginning to talk union, and Brady considers them communists.
Creator Billy Ray builds on the general focus of the novel in the first four episodes of the nine-episode season, but let’s face it: Most people who watch “Tycoon” will care little about how faithful the series is to either version of the novel.
There is more than enough to capture the eye and, for a while, the imagination. Ray has envisioned a kind of late 1930s “Mad Men,” with the mythology of the film world presaging the world of advertising three decades later. The Depression has the country in a stranglehold, few can afford to go to the movies, another war is looming only a few years down the road. Yet the Dream Factory is in full swing, spinning out fantasy as a distraction, and Monroe Stahr is its Don Draper.
The approach works for a while and, not coincidentally, when the Amazon “Tycoon” most closely adheres to the novel. As long as Stahr remains detached, disturbingly calm in the midst of deception, betrayal and chaos, this “Tycoon” entertains and engages.
By the second half, though, Ray makes the mistake so many others have made in adapting Fitzgerald: He falls back on the melodramatic surface and jettisons the thematic complexity beneath. Things happen without proper foundation, characters become inconsistent and unreliable, scenes play out in miniature as the camera flits back and forth from one subplot to another. The whole Christmas episode is just plain boring.
A number of excellent performances keep the production’s head above water, especially those of DeWitt, Collins, Cilenti and Jennifer Beals as a major screen star with a potentially career-ending secret.
Grammer is memorable, but he’s often ambushed by the script and can’t always bridge the character’s inconsistencies. DeWitt is also saddled with unreliable character development, but glides effortlessly and heartbreakingly over it.
Bomer and McElligott are magnetically interesting, until the thin melodrama kicks in. Once Bomer becomes animated, Stahr stops being mysterious and becomes just another stock hero.
In the end, Fitzgerald gets the better of his adapters as he always has. He understood melodrama, loved it, used it in his best work, but what separated him from, say, Fannie Hurst and the idol of his youth, Booth Tarkington, was perhaps the most important key to his enduring genius. He summed it up simply and indelibly as, “Action is character.” What they do is one thing, but who they are is what will engage the reader. Or viewer.
The more serious problem with the shortcut approach to Fitzgerald is that when you narrowly focus on plot, you miss the opportunity to make use of Fitzgerald’s keen understanding of American mythology after World War I. As Jimmy Gatz and, later, Milton Sternberg remade themselves as Gatsby and Stahr, so, too, did the nation as it made a kind of delayed entry into the new century. “Gatsby” foreshadows the end of the Jazz Age and the onset of the Great Depression in the ephemeral mythology of its antihero’s character. “Tycoon” probes a similar theme, using the film industry as the metaphor for cultural decay.
All his life, despite the fact that he could see right through them, Fitzgerald was desperate to belong to groups that were reluctant to embrace him. He wanted to be a name in Hollywood just as he’d wanted to be one of the popular set at Princeton. He always knew better, of course, which is why he became one of the last century’s greatest American authors. That’s something that adapters might keep in mind.