Movie Reaction: The Goldfinch

Formula: The Red Violin ^ Shattered Glass ^ Boyhood

"Unfilmable" is an overused word. It's become a coverall for every difficult adaptation. It can mean that a book is long or complex. When true stories fit too perfectly, they become "unfilmable" simply because no one would believe them, since they sound too convenient. In my opinion, the best use of "unfilmable" is when there's no way to capture the tone (or even a tone) of the story as a movie. While I haven't read the book, I'm going to guess that The Goldfinch is in that final group of unfilmable.

The Goldfinch follows Theo from childhood (Oakes Fegley) to adulthood (Ansel Elgort) as he's passed along from one situation to the next. You see, as a child, he survives a bombing in an art gallery. His mother dies, and he's passed along to different care-givers over the years. He also turns to drugs. There are a lot of drugs in this movie. Not in a dire, Requiem for a Dream sort of way. They're just there, a lot. The most important thing though, is that when the bombing happens, Theo takes a famous painting, the titular Goldfinch, and carries it with him everywhere he goes as some sort of token of his loss/grief/guilt. The movie dips its toes in a lot of storylines. There's his surrogate family, the girl he's sort of obsessed with, fraudulent antiques, and all that crazy stuff with Boris.

I suspect that the book is long and the power of the story is in the totality of the experiences. My guess is that when it gets to the end, it's less of a climax. Rather, it is the first time Theo gets to take a breath and the totality of his experiences hit him all at once. I think the movie wanted to do that. The problem is that even at 2.5 hours, you could tell they were still struggling to find how to fit everything in. This movie had to be a beast to edit. I think they did the best job possible. It's not a story with an easy Tom Bombadil part that could be cut out without consequence. This should've been a mini-series on HBO, probably with the exact same cast.

There are some parts of the movie I really liked. Nicole Kidman is lovely as Theo's surrogate mother who takes him in for a while. Jeffrey Wright is even better as his surrogate father and eventual business partner. Their parts could've been shrunk, but they're also the heart of the movie. Finn Wolfhad and Aneurin Barnard do a respectable job making Boris not come off like a cartoon. I think I preferred Oakes Fegley to Ansel Elgort as Theo, but that could just be because Elgort comes with more baggage from previous roles.

This movie/story is pretentious. I can't find a better word for it. It's about people existing in a super-rich and privileged world that's hard to relate to. It spends long amounts of time talking about antiquing and art. It's the kind of movie where, when Theo is asked what music he likes and he says "Beethoven", that's a normal or reasonable answer for a 14 year old to give. The great tragedy of Theo's life happens because he's at a fancy art gallery. His dark secret is that he has a painting worth millions of dollars in his possession. The movie is shot (impeccably by Roger Deakins) in a glossy prestige way. It's a Pulitzer prize winning novel. I mean, the Venn Diagram of people who will see this and people who have tickets to the Opera or Ballet is virtually a circle. And that's fine if it was also a good movie.

I'm reminded a lot of Life, Itself from last year. Both movies premiered around the same time of the year. I believe both came out of the Toronto International Film Festival with no buzz. Both are among the 10 worst wide opening weekends ever. Both are literary to a fault. The big difference is that Life, Itself wanted to prove how smart it was, which made me hate it. The Goldfinch makes a good faith effort to be accessible and fails, which makes it mostly just forgettable.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend