I really liked the scene where Nick got drunk (for the second time in his life) with Tom, Myrtle and Myrtle's sister in the gaudy NYC apartment. The movie adaptation did a great job with the tacky wallpaper and chairs and Myrtle was appropriately obnoxious, in wardrobe and behavior. The movie version did downplay a lot of Myrtle's incessant, antagonistic remarks to Tom before he hits her and ultimately Tom is just written of as a drunk. This is a small deviation from the book, but preludes to Tom's questionable behavior near the end of the film in a positive way.
Tobey McGuire portrayed Nick's enchantment with the whole careless, party lifestyle really accurately. The only thing that was taken a bit far was the choice to blast a Kanye West song while Myrtle was twirling and dancing in slow motion. I honestly couldn't think of much else that would jolt a viewer out of the 1920s setting any quicker. I understand that the production team wanted to create an atmosphere of overindulgence, but the very least they could've done would be just using the instrumental version (viewers would've gotten the point). A few lines of the book were repeated in the movie nearly verbatim, but many were modernized/simplified unnecessarily, which goes back to the film not staying 100% true to the time period.
I agree that the movie really victimized Myrtle where she was not so much of a victim in the book. Also Nick seems to walk out of the apartment because of the chaos inside with the violence, but in the novel he just leaves to see the photographs downstairs. Also, the music I felt was very well matched since they had the trumpet from across the street in the background. This street music really brought it back to the 1920s. Maybe the mash up was used to create a bridge between the past and present showing the overlap of values and loose morality found in both. At the same time, I think that the music was also used to make the movie more appealing to a modern audience.
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