Review: The Goldfinch (TIFF 2019)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: Thirteen year old Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley), loses his mother in a terrorist bombing. After the attack, he winds up in the possession of a priceless painting, The Goldfinch, which becomes his constant companion as he becomes an adult (Ansel Elgort) and starts dipping his toe into art forgery.

REVIEW: Something must have gotten lost in the translation. That’s the thought I kept having over and over as I watched THE GOLDFINCH, which is based on the book by Donna Tartt, and was so well received that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Certainly, there must be something more on the page than what ended up on the screen, with THE GOLDFINCH a textbook example of prestige filmmaking gone awry.

It’s shockingly bad considering it comes from director John Crowley, director of two masterful films, BOY A and BROOKLYN. Running an unwieldy two and a half hours, this epic drama feels like something that would have been better as a movie of the week back in the 1970s.

It’s playing TIFF a week before it hits theaters, but word of mouth is bound to be poor for Warner Bros and Amazon, despite the lavish production values and gorgeous cinematography by the great Roger Deakins. It’s probably too sprawling a narrative to make for a film, with the running time split more or less 60/40 in favor of the younger version of Theo, making Elgort’s performance come up rather short, as we have no time to invest in him as a character. He and young Oakes Fegley don’t have a lot of continuity between them, with the only carryover being they both wear glasses. Everything is quite surface level. We see Theo live through a traumatic childhood spent in recession-era Arizona among the foreclosed homes, but you never get a sense of how the initially shy child winds up this smooth, globe-trotting antique dealer.

Nicole Kidman’s role also feels short-changed, with her as the high society lady who initially takes in Theo but loses him to his unscrupulous, degenerate father (Luke Wilson – trying hard but ill-used in a thin role). For some odd reason, despite only a decade or so passing between the periods, Kidman is made up to look like a much older woman in the modern scenes, one of the many cheesy aspects of the production which almost elevate this into “so bad its good” territory.

Other ill-fitting performances include Finn Wolfhard, who chews the scenery as young Theo’s Russian-accented pal Boris, who shows him how to snort Vicodin, something Theo is supposed to be addicted to but the movie fails to convey at all. Sarah Paulson is puzzlingly cast as the trashy Xandra, Theo’s father’s girlfriend, as it’s a nothing part, and furthers the movie’s elitist subtext, with anyone not among the upper class in this being depicted as trashy. The one person who comes out ahead is Jeffrey Wright as Theo’s compassionate mentor, an antique dealer, and he’s the only one to feel like he’s not playing a caricature.

It’s not a particularly good showcase for Elgort coming off of the star-making BABY DRIVER, with that character he’s playing ultimately having very little substance, although the wardrobe he wears is admittedly impressive. When people dismiss movies as awards bait, they’re talking about movies like this. It passes itself off as an “important” movie, but it has very little to say, and if there’s a message here it’s not conveyed at all. THE GOLDFINCH is bad enough that I suspect any real awards consideration is out of the question, except maybe for Deakins’s cinematography. It's beautiful to look at, but if Tartt’s book was something special that doesn’t come across in the movie at all.

The Goldfinch

BELOW AVERAGE

5

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