Mark Reviews Movies: THE GOLDFINCH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 12, 2019

Handsomely mounted but vapid in almost every other regard, The Goldfinch relates the events of a story and pretty much ends its ambitions there. What's fascinating is how filled with potential that story actually is. It concerns a teenage boy, who experiences tragedy and bears witness to assorted other tragedies, and then it concerns that boy as a young man, who finds that his entire life has been defined by what happened to himself and those in his immediate sphere in the past.

There's also a priceless painting involved, which comes into the character's possession after that initial tragedy. If not for the fact that movie's title refers to the painting, one could be forgiven for forgetting that it matters here. The filmmakers certainly seem to forget about it almost entirely until it becomes a plot point in the third act.

One could argue that screenwriter Peter Straughan and director John Crowley don't attach any sort of message to these events because they'd rather audience members determine that for themselves. The other option is that the filmmakers simply don't attach any meaning to what happens in this story because they either don't know or were too unmotivated to care.

Then again, maybe it's unfair to suggest that there isn't a meaning to this years-jumping tale. There is one, stated rather bluntly by a character during an extended monologue, which also serves to clear up the complications of the plot without a lick of effort. It only seems like there isn't a message to this story, because the one the movie gives us is so obvious, so banal, and so late in the telling that it probably isn't even worth mentioning. The experience of hearing it once, said as almost a throwaway line after more than two hours of stilted and aimless melodrama, is more than enough.

What went wrong here? The story comes from Donna Tartt's novel, which was widely praised (and derided by others, too, which, along with the movie that has resulted, seems like a good enough reason not to rush out to read it), so maybe it's simply an issue of transforming a work that isn't suited to a straightforward, plot-focused adaptation. Such things certainly occur, but Crowley's movie seems especially hollow, considering how much actually happens in this story.

Its storytelling drags for an interminable stretch, before rushing into the particulars of a third-act plot that is resolved almost as quickly as it's introduced. Its characters exist to do things and to have things done to them, but there's no sense of an inner life to any of them—most especially the lead character.

He's Theo Decker, played as a teenager, whose mother is killed in bomb attack at a New York City museum, by Oakes Fegley and as a young man, who has become a shady antiques dealer, by Ansel Elgort. After the attack, Theo lives with the wealthy family of a classmate. Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), the mother, comes to adore the boy, and he strikes up friendships with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), an antiques dealer whose business partner was killed in the explosion, and Pippa (Aimee Laurence as a teen and Ashleigh Cummings as an adult), the partner's granddaughter who survived the attack.

Soon enough, Theo is whisked away to Las Vegas by his deadbeat, indebted, and alcoholic father Larry (Luke Wilson) and dad's live-in girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson). There, he becomes friends with Boris (Finn Wolfhard), who introduces Theo to all sorts of vices—mainly drugs. Meanwhile, as an adult, Theo has to deal with a client who knows he sold him a fake piece and who also suspects that Theo is in possession of a painting that went missing after the attack—which he is.

Things happen, and that's about it. Characters from Theo's childhood re-appear in his adulthood by chance (One reunion is so unlikely but so necessary for the plot that it's laughable). All of them are grieving and/or regretful in some way (Three kids here have lost mothers, and both Theo and Pippa say—and that's the end of it—they blame themselves for the deaths of their loved ones). Straughan and Crowley, though, are as interested in that key piece of the tale and these characters as they are in the eponymous painting: It gets an occasional mention or visual reminder, but it mostly exists as a vague concept to keep the story moving as required.

Something vital is missing from The Goldfinch. Well, a lot of important things—characters who aren't just pawns, a story that communicates a sense of purpose, an actual sense of emotional weight to the proceedings—are absent from this languid, directionless movie.

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