The Goldfinch is a 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The movie based on the book feels like an outline Donna Tartt gave herself before she started penning her award winning fiction literature. All plot and no characters, The Goldfinch movie takes away what made the book such a special piece of art, like the Goldfinch painting Theo (Ansel Elgort) obsesses over.
The Goldfinch the painting is hanging in an art museum in New York City. Theo (Oakes Fegley, as a young kid) is there, looking at it with his mom. Then tragedy strikes: there’s a bombing at the museum. Disoriented, Theo walks out of the museum with The Goldfinch at the request of an old man near the painting. In the process, Theo finds out his mother has passed away. The Goldfinch movie then takes us through Theo’s life and the people he meets, including Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman) and her loving family, Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), who runs an antiques shop, Blackwell and Holbrook, while raising his daughter Pippa (Ashleigh Cummings), and Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a lonely young boy like Theo himself. All along his journeys, The Goldfinch follows Theo from location to location, as the young man figures out what he wants to do with it.
The movie version of this beloved novel is in name only. The screenplay misunderstands what makes The Goldfinch work: Theo, and his relationship to all these interesting complicated people. It’s almost as if the writer felt like the movie would grow too long with that many characters. As a result, the movie adaptation is stripped down along plot lines only, moving from point to point and not really giving the audience time to slow down. Now, the plot is pretty thrilling, and LOTS of stuff happens. But, if you don’t give a crap about any of these people, who cares? It’s all empty immediately. Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Oakes Fegley and Finn Wolfhard do their best to make The Goldfinch matter, but their efforts were wasted because of the screenplay’s sacrifices. Any substance The Goldfinch builds towards is immediately ripped apart by severely underwritten characters or copious offscreen deaths/exits. There’s enough here to make me want to read the book now, but I wish I’d just read the book instead and ignored this disappointment.
Ok, that’s enough. To write more about this movie would do a disservice to a great novel. Just take my word for it: go read the novel, and be satisfied with your story, instead of just teased for 2 hours like this movie did to me.