In John Crowley’s new film, The Goldfinch of the title is a Carel Fabritius painting from 1654 that has changed hands and owners for centuries, always surviving tragedy. But despite the specific title, the film, and the novel it’s based on, is not really about the painting, but it is about a young boy who unwittingly becomes the owner to a great piece of artistic history. Thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker’s life is upturned when his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His hitherto unspectacular life becomes that much more remarkable and dangerous as he moves from household to household, all the while carrying the secret that he’s stolen the Fabritius painting and is hoarding it for reasons unknown.
This central conceit in Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel makes the novel of “The Goldfinch” part-bildungsroman as we watch Theo come of age, and part art thesis as we are given background into the painting and the value of object and art in the 21st century. “The Goldfinch” opened last week at the Toronto International Film Festival to high expectations and landed with a thud. Critics were unenthused, and so were audiences judging from the lacklustre box-office, but in some ways, “The Goldfinch”, a film adaptation of a discursive, cerebral 500-page novel seemed doomed from the start.
Throughout the 149-minute running time of “The Goldfinch”, I kept wondering what was the impetus for this adaptation. Why did Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughn want to tell this story? Tartt’s own novel is marked by a rambling discursiveness that is less concerned with tying everything together, and more compelled by the idea of investigating divergent strands of human existence. Film is not necessarily unable to examine that divergence, but Crowley and Straughn are clearly conscious of the potential for confusion and work to streamline all the divergent parts of its source into a singularly mounted sheen that makes a whole out of conflicting strands. It doesn’t completely work. “The Goldfinch” never has enough confidence in itself to be truly bizarre or weird, which means that much of the time it feels trapped in a beautifully rendered stoicism that creates a distant remove between content and emotion. What’s intriguing about the film, though, better than it’s given credit for, is how that stoicism becomes part of its own visual aesthetic, creating meaning from absence.
At two-and-a-half hours, it’s a credit to everyone involved that “The Goldfinch” does not feel overlong. In fact, by having its final sequence wrap up so quickly, the film feels brief in some ways. The film roots its story in a sort of media res conceit moving between adult Theo coming to grips with his troubling childhood and possibly joyless future, and the teenaged Theo recovering from the guilt he feels at his mother’s own death. For a lengthy sequence in the middle, we move with young Theo to Las Vegas. Removed from the New York world of antiques and art, it’s the film’s weakest section even as its value is important. The divergent performances of Sarah Paulson as a boozy stepmother, Luke Wilson as a vengeful father, Finn Wolfhard as a charming but undependable friend and Oakes Fegley as our dubious hero don’t quite gel together. Each of the quartet seems to be working in their own movie. They are each individually credible, but together the tone they strike seems at odds with everything else in the film. By the time the film’s final act explains the value of this middle section, it feels as if we have lost too much time with adult Theo.
It leaves little time for us to spend with Ansel Elgort as the older Theo, who, despite his top billing, really shares the role with his younger co-star. Rather than a generous adaptation of every crisis in Tartt’s novel, “The Goldfinch” may have served itself better by extracting a single strand of the story to build its own adaptation. Despite a tragic family life, Theo finds a willing mentor in Hobie, an antiques dealer. Hobie merges old things with new things in his work creating something somewhere between real and fake. There’s a sequence where he explains to an older Theo that a thing is only fake if it’s being passed off as real and somewhere in there is a thesis about the film itself which is so earnest, and sincere in trying to do so much that it loses track of the things that are real and true about it, that make it authentic.
What we’re left with are moments that rise above the whole. Nicole Kidman is reliably dependable as a sympathetic matriarch who takes in the orphaned Hobie. The role appears especially illusory in the translation here but Kidman – beneath pounds of aging makeup – is essential in tying the narratives of young and older Theo together. She has excellent chemistry with both Fegley and Elgort, creating a tender woman trapped in her own curation of herself. Elgort is better than he’s given credit for, effectively telegraphing older Theo’s jaded closedness in a role that plays to his own tendency for opacity. It doesn’t help that he and Fegley don’t seem to have the same kind of sensibilities as actors, so the chasm between Theo as a child and as an adult threaten to confuse the audience. But he’s best in the film’s unusual final sequence, opposite Aneurin Barnard who he has more chemistry with than either of the two women that take up the competing romancing subplots (easily the worst part of the adaptation.)
The “Goldfinch” ends on a somewhat heavy handed conceit musing on fate and ideas and destiny but there’s a charm in its earnest openness. It drops the ball in some ways by hiding the painting that represents its title. By the time we come to understand the value of the eponymous painting, it’s likely some audience members have already mentally checked out. But, within the odd missteps, I find myself moved by the full-mouth, open-hearted yearning for hope and forgiveness that the film espouses. This movie is not always graceful, and it sometimes get in its own way, but “The Goldfinch” is not the ungainly literary adaptation it’s been made out to be. Like a painting that gets hidden under the rubble, “The Goldfinch” deserves a second, more generous glance.
