Australian director Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel about ambition, materialist success, identity, romantic obsession and failure is one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year. Besides reading Fitzgerald's silky, sinuous prose on the page, you can now prepare yourself with this audiobook read by Jake Gyllenhaal. So smooth, cool and balanced is the Academy Award nominee's narration that it begs the question: why wasn't he chosen to play Nick Carraway instead of Tobey Maguire? His voice mellifluously conveys the beautiful rhythms of Fitzgerald's unsurpassed writing yet is supple enough to capture Carraway's satirical amusement at the doings of his cousin, Daisy, and her brutish husband, Tom Buchanan, and the weary melancholy of his grand disillusion - embodied by the titular Jay Gatsby, whose love for Daisy inspires the grandest of illusions. My only gripe is that Gyllenhaal doesn't quite capture the famously elegiac ending, both defiant and deflated. And the crashing piano doesn't help.
