Portrayals of Fitzgeralds not credible in series
“Poor Scott Fitzgerald.” That’s how a character in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” described the author of “The Great Gatsby.” It had to do with something Fitzgerald wrote about rich people, but the statement could have been applied to almost every film or television adaptation of the works and lives of Fitzgerald and his Alabamaborn wife, Zelda.
Such is the case with “Z: The Beginning of Everything,” starring Christina Ricci in the title role. The new series on the streaming service Amazon Prime is available today.
After meeting Zelda in 1918, Fitzgerald was determined he was going to marry her, but she kept him at bay for a while.
At the time, he was on the rebound from the loss of his first great love, a young woman named Ginevra King, who came from a well-off family. The breakup left Fitzgerald embittered and fed his fundamental feeling of inferiority and insecurity.
But King not only served as the inspiration for several Fitzgerald heroines, including Daisy Buchanan in “Gatsby,” but she also was in the author’s mind when he wrote that “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.”
None of this is in the Amazon Prime series, but the show’s creators, Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin, have done some homework, lightly peppering their script with factual details about the Fitzgeralds.
For example, after Scott ( David Hoflin) and Zelda are married in 1920, he invites a number of people to their suite at the Biltmore, including pals from his days at Princeton. There’s a reference to the Triangle Club, of which Fitzgerald was a member, and a passing remark about a couple of Princeton linebackers being attracted to him. It would have been helpful to know, however, that the Triangle Club is famous for featuring a chorus line of men in drag.
The creators also share that, after Zelda died in a 1948 fire at the North Carolina mental hospital where she was living, a woman’s slipper found in the ashes was identified as having belonged to her.
“Z” is supposed to be the story of the Fitzgeralds from Zelda’s point of view, and it is based on the book “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald,” by Therese Fowler. Because it’s based on a novel, the series has a right to take some license. Yet that doesn’t excuse the writers for failing to create credible characters.
Hoflin’s Fitzgerald is harmlessly one-dimensional.
And although Zelda was more than just headstrong and slightly madcap, the show’s character is all over the map. She’s a pouting child and then a pouting wife.
She’s awed by her new surroundings when she travels to New York to get married, and she comes across as a subservient child- bride until she strips naked and walks into the post- wedding bash to tell the drunken hangers- on to leave .
It’s possible that an acceptable performance could have patched over some of the cavernous inconsistencies in Zelda’s characterization, but Ricci’s performance is abominable. She shows no grasp of the character, even as written, seeing her only as a flighty Southern belle out of some old magnolias- and- julep melodrama.
After F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was buried in Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland. He was denied burial in a Catholic cemetery because his books had been proscribed by the Catholic Church. Zelda was interred there as well after her death.
At the urging of their daughter, Scottie, the Fitzgeralds were reinterred in 1975 across the street in the small graveyard of St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
Perhaps their story might have best been left to rest in peace, too.