"The Goldfinch" is an Interesting Flop

No film of the last year has been so obviously a prestige project as "The Goldfinch." The cast, lead by Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman, is star studded. The crew, including director John Crowley and cinematographer Roger Deakins, is highly regarded and unquestionably talented. The source material won a Pulitzer in 2014. However, as with too many projects that look so good on paper, this one just didn't work. A 784 page novel being adapted to roughly 150 minutes of film is a tall order in any circumstances, and perhaps no one should be surprised at the results. However, the finished film isn't a complete failure or unwatchable in the least, and I can't help picking it over.

Much of the trouble with "The Goldfinch" is that it comes in several very distinct parts, some significantly better than others. The first follows our main character, Theo Decker, as a thirteen year-old played by Oakes Fegley. He survives a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, but his mother is killed. Since Theo's deadbeat father is out of the picture, he ends up in the care of the upper crust Barbour family, as he's friends with their son Andy (Ryan Foust), and soon becomes close to Andy's mother Samantha (Nicole Kidman). As an adult, Theo is played by Ansel Elgort, a troubled antiques dealer who is friends with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), a furniture restorer, and harbors an unrequited love for a woman named Pippa (Ashleigh Cummings). Other important characters include Samantha's daughter Kitsey (Willa Fitzgerald), Theo's father Larry (Luke Wilson), his girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson), and a Ukrainian named Boris (Finn Wolfhard as a child, Aneurin Barnard as an adult), who Theo befriends.

The sections where Theo is a child are so much better than the ones where he is an adult, that I half-wonder why they bothered to include the latter sections at all. It's clear that the filmmakers weren't nearly as interested in them either, as the present day material doesn't receive nearly the amount of attention, the plotting is ridiculous and unsatisfying, and none of the characters are particularly compelling, grown-up Theo included. Obsessions and conceits that work when the main characters are children look peculiar or just plain silly when they're grown-ups. Important connective tissue is missing, and the film is full of oddly shaped gaps. Part of this is due to the film being structured like a mystery, as Theo lost some memories in the bombing, but these elements are set up so poorly that most of the reveals fall flat.

There's also this off-putting strain of elitism throughout, where the rich and cultured Barnards are put in stark opposition to Theo's grifter father who lives in Las Vegas, portrayed as a literal cultural desert. I understand that the main themes of the film heavily involve art, antiques, and their preservation, but the themes are not handled well, and the discussion of art far too often remains totally surface level, resulting in some rushed scenes and unfortunate messaging that I don't think were intentional. There's also a crime story element that comes in way too late, throwing the film even further off balance, and substance abuse issues that are barely even acknowledged. The narrative suffers from trying to do far, far too much, and I suspect from following the gargantuan novel too closely.

Still, I liked some sections of the film and several of the performances. Oakes Fegley is a wonderful grounding presence who succeeds in making pretentious little Theo believable where other child actors would have stumbled. Finn Wolfhard is weirdly appealing as young Boris, outrageous accent and all. It's hard not to love Jeffrey Wright as one of the few sympathetic adults, who is also the one character able to reel off exposition about art with some degree of passion. Deakins' work is as beautiful as always, and the whole Las Vegas sequence is very memorable. There's about thirty minutes of a very good film here that I'm glad I saw.

What I'm most upset about is that "The Goldfinch" was a high profile, risky project made with a mid-range budget, and its failure is going to negatively impact filmmakers the next time something like this comes along. Then again, I suspect "The Goldfinch" would have been much better as a television miniseries, where it would have had the running time to more fully explore its sprawling story and assortment of promising characters.

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