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| Source - Reader’s High Tea |
“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
-Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it automatically will in another. There’s egotism in Hollywood that often leads people to assume that anything—a TV show, a play, certainly a Pulitzer Prize-winning book—can be made into a feature film.
But the urgency of being in a theater with actors, the depth allowed by hundreds of pages in a book, the episodic structure of television—you simply can’t mimic it.
And there may be no better example of that blind assumption than John Crowley’s “The Goldfinch,” which adapts Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winner with disastrous results, zapping it of all nuances, leaving only the plot, which wasn’t exactly the source material's strength
Introduction
Movie’s Name - The Goldfinch
Directed by - John Crowley
Rating - R (Drug Use and Language)
Genre - Drama
Original Language - English
Runtime - 2h 29m
Plot: Spoiler Alert!
The title of the book and movie refers to a painting that was on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art on the day that Theo Decker’s life changed forever. Theo (Oakes Fegley) was there with his mother when a terrorist attack happened, killing her and others, and leaving rubble.
Theo woke up and took the painting, something that had survived for centuries, handed down over generations, but now looks like it could get lost in the grief spiral that Theo is about to enter over the next two decades of his life.
Before taking the painting, Theo is handed a ring by a dying man, and told to take it back to his partner Hobie (Jeffrey Wright). With his mother dead and his father MIA, young Theo becomes a part of two worlds—that of an upper-class family that takes him in, led by a matriarch played by Nicole Kidman, and the antiques shop run by Hobie.
Of course, both are incredibly formative, and one of the strongest themes of this narrative is what Paul Auster calls “the music of chance”—the idea that random events, even tragedies, shape us into people we wouldn’t otherwise be.
Theo’s mother is killed. As he groggily regains consciousness among the dust, rubble and bodies, a dying man whom Theo had initially noticed with a little girl is also still alive and, before expiring, entrusts him with a ring and gives him a place to deliver it.
Theo impulsively takes The Goldfinch off the wall and staggers out of the building with it in his bag.
Among the chaos of cops, firefighters and paramedics, no one thinks to challenge him. Theo is at first taken in by his friend’s elegant mother (a tremendous cameo from Nicole Kidman), but is then sent to live with his louche and grasping dad (Luke Wilson) in Las Vegas, where he befriends a Ukrainian kid, Boris (Finn Wolfhard).
Poor Theo grows up to be a damaged and Vicodin-addicted adult (played by Ansel Elgort), who hides his hurt under a veneer of bogus sophistication having undergone a Ripleyesque reinvention as a smooth and crooked antiques dealer under the tutelage of kindly expert Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), to whom the ring had led him.
But the priceless painting, which Theo has secretly under wraps in a storage depot, throbs like a second, unexploded bomb, and he is destined to meet up again with grownup Boris (Aneurin Barnard).
About the Movie
The Goldfinch stands, in Theo’s mind, for his mother, for the terrible fact of her absence: it is the poignant symbol of irrecoverable loss and hurt. All the painting’s supposed value as an immortal thing of beauty has now been simultaneously supercharged and yet diminished by the association.
The movie does a fair amount of justice to the painting’s MacGuffin-ish properties. But long episodes clunk past rather laboriously and Elgort does not give us much access to his character’s emotional tumult. (Kidman, on the other hand, plays her character arc well.)
It all comes down to the extraordinary scene that triggers everything else: the bomb in the art gallery. In the book it is a riveting, complex, detailed affair. As for the film, it is quite legitimate to avoid the on-the-nose storytelling, but this is frustratingly deferred and dispersed as flashback glimpses and, bewilderingly, we are never allowed the simple thrill of piecing it all together in order.
The pure power of that detonation is muffled. And the car park shootout at the end: that is dispensed with hurriedly, as if the film wishes to rise above mere action entertainment.
Personal Verdict
The film is co-financed by Amazon Studios and maybe it would have worked better as an eight-part TV drama. As it is, the story is all effort fully squeezed into two and a half hours, but with key moments suddenly whizzing past as if on fast-forward, and the most explosively important part bafflingly relegated to flashback fragments that never come together in a single, compelling scene.
It should also be said that the casting and performances are, in some crucial cases, seriously off. A gambling addict deprived of money does a lot of histrionic screaming.
And, as for the Russian characters: well, they do not have to be played by Russian actors of course, but the non-Russians given the job have to do something more than speak in an unconvincing Russian accent.
There’s a subplot in which Theo learns about cobbling together broken antiques to make them look new again. They aren’t original antiques, and Hobie warns him not to sell them as such.
They’re fake, produced by machines from spare parts and lacking the human touch of the real thing. If a film ever had a better in-story symbol of its own failing, I can’t think of it.
The Bottom Line
If you are a fan of seeing movies trying to replicate an awarded and wholesome Novel then I would recommend you not to go for this one rather read the novel which will give you a true feel of the content and subject.
My ratings for the movie – 2.5 on 5
You may watch the movie on Amazon Prime - The Goldfinch
Written By - Resmita Barai
Edited By - Umme-Aiman
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