The Goldfinch a dreary, meaningless drama that makes audience work too hard
Earlier this decade, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch was the book on everyone’s bedside table. The inevitable screen adaptation is the movie that will put everyone to sleep.
Leigh Paatsch
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Earlier this decade, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch was the book on everyone’s bedside table.
The inevitable screen adaptation is the movie that will put everyone to sleep.
This dreary, deep and meaningless drama makes its audience work too hard for too little return, with static performances and unnecessarily coded scripting further compounding the frustration of the book’s many admirers.
The story begins with the bombing of a New York art gallery, an event which continues to ruin and reshape the fortunes of a young man who survived the ordeal.
Theo Decker (played by Oakes Fegley as a teen, then Ansel Elgort as an adult) lost his mother in the tragedy, but gained possession of her favourite (and near-priceless) painting in the chaotic aftermath.
The theft sends Theo on a drifting search where it may never become clear what he might be looking for.
A family? A friend? A lover? A buyer? You’ll be too busy looking at your watch to notice if an answer is forthcoming.
The narrative flow of The Goldfinch is oddly disjointed, as if it has been inelegantly hacked down from a longer version.
As it stands, the running time is almost two and a half hours here, all of which indicates this production might have been mounted as a multi-episodic affair for television or premium streaming.
As an adaptation of a prestige work of literature, The Goldfinch had no trouble attracting an accomplished cast, which includes the likes of Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson and Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard.
Most of them are under-utilised or (possibly at the instruction of the director) overly mannered, to the point where they become uniformly annoying as a group.
THE GOLDFINCH (M)
Director: John Crawley (Brooklyn)
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Nicole Kidman, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson.
Rating: *1/2
Swiftly falls off the perch
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