'All the bright precious things'
CRAFT | POLISH is reader-supported. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.
Everyone has movie moments that delight them—ones they rewatch due to the stunning visuals they present or the strong feelings they generate. Teaching English, I revisit one of these regularly, in rewatching Baz Luhrmann’s sparkling 2013 adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925).
The scene is, in fact, not one of the lavish party scenes that made Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge) —auteur of stylistic eccentricity and excess in film—so perfectly suited to direct a Gatsby adaptation. The scene takes place near the start, when Nick Carraway is first reconnecting with college friends Tom and Daisy Buchanan at their Georgian Colonial estate in the prestigious enclave of East Egg.
After dinner, Daisy and Nick stroll out onto a marbled and manicured veranda, overlooking the Buchanans’ gardens and the bay separating the old and new money of East and West Egg. In the novel, the vista that stretches beyond the Buchanans’ home is integral to its extravagance, and the fluid description tracks this view:
The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open….
In the film, Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Nick (Tobey Maguire) wander out into this grandeur in the summer evening, as Daisy tells Nick of her cynicism and her disenchanted life with Tom. Daisy recounts Tom’s absence at the time of their daughter’s birth, and her depressed hope for her daughter to be ‘the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
At this moment, in Lurhmann’s adaptation, Daisy is heard speaking a line not found in the novel: ‘All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.’ At these words, the camera sweeps out over the garden, past the ‘green light’ on Daisy’s dock, up and across the bay to Gatsby’s pier, where his shadowy figure is seen walking out to the water. In peak flight, the lights of New York City glitter in the distance, as the score swells sadly over the entire shot. The whole sequence is majestic.
The line seems to amalgamate Nick’s description of Daisy’s face as ‘sad and lovely with bright things in it’, with the novel’s core lament—rejected by the eternally hopeful Gatsby—that ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ The camera flight, connecting the lovers from across the bay, seems at once nostalgic, aspirational and fated—true to the the crux of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, exposing the mythologised yet self-perpetuating ideal of the American Dream. Accordingly, ‘the bright precious things’ which ‘don’t come back’ might be youth, love, beauty, hopes, dreams—all of these. Yet Lurhmann’s soaring moment depicts those faded things as still-glittering possibilities, in the looping vein of Fitzgerald’s famous concluding lines:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning— / So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
These aesthetics, novel and film, are potent and captivating, and apt for revisiting time and again—perhaps exactly as they were intended.
