While discussing how he reintroduced himself to The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann says in his interview, “I don’t know this book at all. The difference between book and movie is Luhrmann’s decision to have Nick in a sanatorium. Luhrmann got this idea from another book of Fitzgerald’s who had a narrator in an asylum.

James Gatz transforms from an impoverished young man into a wealthy member of the social elite by completely altering his identity and amassing a fortune in the bootlegging industry. Jay Gatsby also transforms into a love-stricken, ambitious man with the goal of marrying Daisy after initially meeting her.

His wife, Myrtle Wilson, and Tom Buchanan, who describes him as “so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive”, both dislike him. At the end of the novel, he kills Gatsby, wrongly believing he had been driving the car that killed Myrtle, and then kills himself.

His real name is James Gatz, and he was born to an impoverished farmer in North Dakota, rather than into wealth in San Francisco, as he claimed. He had his named legally changed to Jay Gatsby at the age of seventeen. Cody took Gatsby in and made the young man his personal assistant.

The hotel scene in the movie differs from the novel for one main reason: Gatsby does not grab Tom and yell “shut up” in the novel, but does in the movie. This gives the audience of the movie a reason for Daisy to have doubts about Gatsby, but this doubt is not portrayed in the novel.

Daisy does have the capability of love, she just doesn’t love Tom but she tries her best and she wants stay in the old money lifestyle. Gatsby wants Daisy to see his house because he wants to impress her with his wealth.

Tom Buchanan

Best Character Analysis: Tom Buchanan – The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan—hulking, hyper-masculine, aggressive, and super-rich—is The Great Gatsby’s chief representative of old money, and (in a book with many unlikeable people) one of the book’s least sympathetic characters.