The Goldfinch

John Crowley's The Goldfinch has an air of self-importance to it that it does not earn or deserve.  It's a pompous and ponderous slog through a plot that should be emotional, yet never is.  That's because all vitality and life seems to have been drained from every aspect of the production.  The performances, the confused out of sequence narrative, and especially the interminable two and a half hour running time all add up into an experience that is dead in the water from the word "go".

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt, and while the narrative is more or less the same, nothing else from Tartt's original work has survived in the translation.  All nuance, character, and naturally the wording of the novel is missing.  What we have left is a lifeless and dreary reenactment of events from the book that hold almost no distinction or dramatic weight.  The disastrous and deadly dull screenplay is credited to Peter Straughan, who was responsible for another misguided adaptation just two years ago, 2017's The Snowman.  Either Straughan just simply stinks at adapting novels for the screen, or he has lousy luck with the filmmakers chosen to bring his vision to life.  Whatever the case, if I were a studio executive, I would start rejecting his scripts based on novels based on recent evidence.

The title of the film refers to a famous painting that plays a major part in its hero's life.  Young Theo (Oakes Fegley) was visiting New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother, when a terrorist bombing occurred that took his mother's life, as well as many others around him.  Theo survives and takes the painting, and the film follows the journey that both take over the course of 20 years or so.  Among the ruins of the museum, Theo also happens to meet an old dying man who gives the boy a ring, and tells him to give it to his partner Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), a kindly man who runs an antique shop.  With no family to speak for him (his dad is an alcoholic who is currently missing), Theo finds himself adopted by a wealthy family headed by Samantha Barbour (Nicole Kidman), while also learning about antiquing and the difference between a genuine work of art and a replica by Mr. Hobie.

Just as Theo starts to adapt to his new life, his drunken lout of a dad (played by a miscast Luke Wilson) suddenly shows up back in his life, and drags him out to a mostly abandoned desert neighborhood in Las Vegas.  While all this is happening, the movie is constantly making time jumps to when Theo is an adult (now played by Ansel Elgort), having a hard time keeping his life and impending marriage together due to his drug and alcohol use.  Again, none of this connects in the slightest, and anyone who has not read the original novel is likely to be confused, and also wonder why this story is so acclaimed in its original form.  All the complexities and nuances have been stripped away.  In the original novel, Theo narrated in the first-person and shared his inner thoughts.  Here, he comes across as an empty void of a character that we never get to know, and simply reacts to everything and everyone around him.

Because of this, The Goldfinch not only lacks any kind of emotion that an audience can connect with, it also doesn't make a damn bit of sense at times.  The time-jumping, out of sequence narrative has little rhyme or reason, and plays more like an act of confusion rather than a stylistic choice.  There is also something just a little off about the performances here.  Despite talented performers like Kidman and Wright in the cast, nobody seems to be able to rise above this material.  We also get a strange disconnect between the two actors who play Theo at different ages.  While the young Oakes Fegley is fine, Ansel Elgort as the adult is completely one-note and shows no sign of personality.  It's hard enough to relate to these people given their stilted dialogue.  It makes it even harder when you see actors who you know are much better than this giving portrayals that are frequently stiff.

What we have here is a case of something that worked beautifully on the written page, because the author had the time, space and talent to truly explore the depths of these characters.  Take all of that away, and just leave nothing but the basic narrative, and you have what is easily one of the worst films of the year.  This is a failed prestige project that certainly looks beautiful and has attracted some strong talent, but to what end when you're not even going to bother to tell the story properly?

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