Take a dive into the baroque world of Old Masters and international crime sprees in “The Goldfinch.”
The film is based on the eponymous novel by Donna Tartt, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.
The novel remained on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list for 30 weeks and was heralded as the revitalization of the
literary thriller.
What premiered in American movie theaters on Friday will make Tartt wish she never sold the rights to her novel.
It begins in an Amsterdam hotel room splattered in blood, with enough setup for the audience to understand that the protagonist Theo, portrayed by Ansel Elgort, is narrating his own
suicide note.
As he drifts into oblivion, he reminisces about the trauma of his youth, prompting a cliché fade out.
The emotional groundwork of the novel is laid in the first few chapters of the book, where Theo, portrayed by Oakes Fegley, loses his mother in a
tragic accident.
In the spotty aftermath, it is revealed he’s in possession of a 17th century oil masterpiece.
The movie chooses to flash back to just after this event, thus losing the kinetic driving force of grief
and shock.
The film then proceeds to spend no less than 45 minutes on how Theo strives to achieve changeling status with an old money family, headed by a knockoff Jackie Kennedy -esque matriarch.
Theo is then reluctantly whisked to a barren desert wasteland by a cooker-cutter alcoholic father. There, he meets Boris, played by
Finn Wolfhard.
Cue the entrance music with a hard electro ’80s beat and for a moment, you believe everything lackluster leading up until this moment has been intentional.
But this, too, disappoints, except for a few moments that attempt to deliver a tenderness between the protagonist and his most important relationship.
The production carefully skirts around the homoerotic friendship of the two neglected boys who escape their fearful isolated lives through a myriad
of drugs.
Their love is consummated in petty crimes, late-night opiate-fueled skinny dipping and hands reaching out in sleepy desperation to hold one another.
The remainder of the protagonist’s prepubescent memories are told after a hasty catch-up with adult Theo’s progress.
The timeline is exponentially sped up in the second act of the movie to account for the large expanse of pages without plot.
Then with little warning, the third act careens
off course.
With choppy camera footage and plot holes, it feels like a Franksteined ending from an entirely different group of creators.
Herein lies the major problem with director John Crowley’s overambitious project. Crowley opted to turn it into a character piece rather than the slow
thriller it is.
The novel spans 784 dense pages. The film runs for an exhausting two and a half hours and feels concurrently like too little and too
much time.
Adult Theo reveals himself to be a con man, prompting a few promising encounters with an antagonist well played by Denis O’Hare; but eventually this sole thread of a viable plot dissipates, never to be followed up.
Any audience member would have no empathy with the protagonist at this point of the film. His lackadaisical charm doesn’t break through the screen and quite frankly, the viewers simply don’t care if his consequences catch up with him.
Where the plot fails to entertain however, there is plenty of eye candy to
lazily observe.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins serves up neutral and aesthetically-pleasing tableau after tableau. What can be admired in this film is the consistency of his Deakins’ artistic direction.
The entire film is set in a series of rooms: the bomb blasted museum, Manhattan penthouses, Brooklyn flats and grand hotel lobbies. The greater intrusive world of New York City is kept at bay and never shown through anything more than a background blur in the scant
outdoor scenes.
In her novel, Tartt wrote, “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
The film will be a picture to forget for a lifetime.
