Everyone has read The Great Gatsby. Four films have already been made from it – including one starring Robert Redford that would be difficult to top. However, no one has ever attempted a sequel. More notably, Christian Bale has never starred in a sequel.
The film will be set twenty-six years after the Great Gatsby, during 1948. Bale will star as Tommy Buchanan, the second child and first son of Gatsby’s anti-hero and love interest, Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Tommy finds himself aimless, squandering his parents wealth, not sure what to do with himself in the years after his discharge from the Army – which happened in 1945, when he wounded his leg. He still walks with a limp. Unsure what to do with himself during this time, the young Buchanan develops a gambling problem. Soon he has spent all his own fortune, causing him to return to his Long Island home and ask his father for money.
The elder Buchanan – portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis – refuses his son, calling him “an ungrateful wretch.” He tells the young Buchanan to make something of himself. Daisy is absent from this scene, on a trip through Italy.
Bale will truly shine in the following scene, in which the young Buchanan leaves, gets terribly drunk at a nearby country club, and returns to steal his parents’ good silver. He then pawns it, gets more money, and goes to a horse track with it. At the horse track, he meets a young con man named Jacob, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. It turns out that this man is the bastard son of old Jay Gatsby, and together they begin a plot to swindle old Tom Buchanan out of his fortune.
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