The Goldfinch has
been catching a lot of flak from the critics, which it both does and does not
deserve. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name by Donna
Tartt (which, full disclosure, I’ve never read), adapting this 800-page mammoth
was going to be a herculean task for any filmmaker. Cut things out to shave
down the runtime, and you wouldn’t be doing the book justice. Leave everything
in and you’ll potentially end up with a bloated, self-indulgent clusterfuck. There
are some problems that are pretty hard to argue against. It’s dryer than an
Arizona snakeskin, the performances are hit and miss, it loses momentum toward
the third act, and there are moments where it feels like its contorting itself
to get that Oscar recognition. However, when comparing the final product to the
critical flogging it’s receiving, I do feel a need to step in and let the
people know it’s not that bad.
Our story follows Theo (Oakes Fegley
as a kid, Ansel Elgort as an adult), whose life is permanently changed after
his mother dies in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An encounter
with a dying stranger leads him to flee the scene with a painting of a
goldfinch chained to a perch that miraculously survived the explosion. This
sends Theo’s life into a series of unfortunate events. Over the course of a
decade, Theo is taken in by a wealthy family friend (Nicole Kidman), whisked
away by his estranged deadbeat dad (Luke Wilson) to live with him and his
girlfriend (Sarah Paulson) in Las Vegas, befriends a charming but troubled
Ukranian ex-patriot (Finn Wolfhard), then returns to New York and becomes the
apprentice of an antique restorer (Jeffrey Wright), all while keeping the
painting a secret from everyone around him.
The Goldfinch bares
plenty of the hallmarks of a complex and beefy book condensed into more concise
and straightforward narrative of a film, where certain elements were noticeably
lost in translation, and of a stuffy prestige drama more preoccupied with
collecting Oscars than telling a compelling story or elevating the artform. In
terms of translation errors, its in the same camp as the recent It
adaptations, where it’s a sprawling saga spanning over two decades,
pontificating on how the traumas of childhood effect our adulthood, but the narrative
compression ends up feeling more like a book report than something more
organic, and for whatever reason the kid narrative ends up being more
compelling than the adult narrative. Theo’s life after the explosion becomes
intrinsically tied to the Goldfinch painting, the last created by artist Carel
Fabritius, who also died in an explosion. But aside from a keepsake of that
fateful day, it mostly remains tucked away until it plays an important role in
the third act. He also has an unrequited and unresolved love for Pippa (Aimee
Laurence as a kid, Ashliegh Cummings as an adult), another survivor who’s
mostly reduced to an unrequited object of Theo’s desire. As a mini-series, these
plot point probably could’ve been better expanded upon, but as it is, I chalk
it up to the limitations of the medium.
As far as performances go, it’s
kind of a mixed bag, with Oakes Fegley's tremendous performance leaving nearly everyone else in the dust. This would be a
demanding tole for an actor of any age, but Fegley knocks it out of the park,
expertly conveying the sadness, grief, confusion and frustration that someone
in that situation would reasonably be going through. The rest of the cast is a
bit spotty. Luke Wilson does brilliantly as Theo’s sketchy father trying in
vain to get a hold of his son’s trust fund, (There’s a bit of ambiguity over whether
he’s doing it out of greed or to get out of debt with some loan sharks.) Sarah
Paulson and Nicole Kidman do fine even if they’re both woefully underutilized,
and while some people sneered at Finn Wolfhard’s phony Slavic drawl, the friendship
between Theo and Boris was far and away my favorite part of the whole movie. On
the other hand, Ansel Elgort struggles to carry the same emotional weight as
his younger counterpart, and as a result his part of the story ends up feeling empty
and emotionally constipated.
That emotional constipation
exasperates the dragging pace of the third act. While the book was told
chronologically, the movie shakes things up by switching back and forth between
timelines, but once Young Theo’s timeline is all caught up and we reach the
climax, it starts dragging its feet toward the finish line, and that’s when
this movie really starts to feel its length. Since the book is nearly 800 pages
long, it seems inevitable that this would be so long, but a lengthy runtime is
forgivable if you can keep up a good enough pace (just look at any Quentin
Tarantino film), and while this movie keeps things moving fast enough to keep
your interest, the third act is where it started to lose me.
But despite all that, I can’t
really bring myself to hate The Goldfinch, at least not to the extension
that most of the other critics do. It’s a bloated mess at times, but it keeps
your attention, it looks amazing (I didn’t even get into the gorgeous
cinematography, but that’s to be expected when you have Roger Deakins as your
DP), and there’s more to it than the critics are giving it credit for. If you
were looking forward to seeing it either because you’re a fan of the book or you
were sold by the trailer, I say it’s at least worth a shot. As far as stuffy,
Oscar-baiting prestige dramas go, you can do so much worse.
6/10
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