F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams

In the last year of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned $13.13 in royalties from the sales of his books. When he died, in 1940 at the age of 44, a total of eleven mourners attended the funeral of the author of The Great Gatsby and brilliant chronicler of the Jazz Age. Dewitt Sage's F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams, an absorbing biography in the American Masters series, combines archival footage and stills; interviews with scholars, biographer A. Scott Berg, novelists E.L. Doctorow and Ward Just, and childhood friends of Fitzgerald's son Scottie; and readings by Campbell Scott, Laura Linney, Amy Irving and William Sadler, to chart the tragic life of (like his most famous creation, Jay Gatsby) a genuine casualty of the American dream. Touching on his St. Paul, Minnesota childhood, the film traces Fitzgerald's early struggles and aspirations (Fitzgerald knew the rich were different and he sought their company, but was socially rejected and eventually dropped out of Princeton), his brief military life (where he met his furture wife Zelda Sayre), and his dogged attempts to get his first book published by Scribners (aided by legendary editor Max Perkins). Fitzgerald's overnight success from his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920) was bittersweet, precisely because the author intrinsically understood that the moment was evanescent--what mattered was the striving. Still, Fitzgerald had more than his fair share of woe over the years, as Zelda's madness, Hemingway's backbiting (Ward Just: "Hemingway never saw a man down that he didn't want to kick"), and financial woes, combined with alcohol abuse and illness, eventually sucked the life out of this once-poster boy for the bright lights, big city life of Manhattan during the '20s. While the film rather oddly omits certain details (such as Zelda's death in a fire in 1948), this is overall a compelling portrait of one of the 20th century's most gifted, yet also most tragic, American authors. Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)