THE GOLDFINCH
★★ (Cert 15, 149mins)
ALL seemed to be in place for this big-budget adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prizewinning novel. It had a great cast, a talented cinematographer (Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins) and what looked like the perfect pairing of writer and director.
John Crowley directed the lovely period drama based on Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn while screenwriter Peter Straughan masterfully distilled John le Carré’s spy classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy into one of the most riveting movies of this century.
Sadly both get lost in Tartt’s near-800-page novel. Books this size are more suited to a TV mini series. Drastic measures were needed to turn it into a film but this time the cuts have been made in all the wrong places.This dull but handsome drama retains most of the events from the novel but scrambles the timeline to tell the potted history of Theo Decker (a bored-looking Ansel Elgort) who we meet in an Amsterdam apartment in his early 20s.
At 13 (now played by Oakes Fegley), he loses his mother in a terrorist bombing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art where a dying man hands him a ring and a priceless painting of a goldfinch.
Then he is taken under the wing of the mother of one of his friends (Nicole Kidman) and befriends a local antiques restorer (Jeffrey Wright).
Theo catches another bad break when his gambling addict father (Luke Wilson) shows up and brings him to a deserted housing estate in LasVegas. There he befriends Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a lonely Russian teen who introduces him to drugs.
After running away, he winds up back in New York, abruptly grows up and ends up dealing in counterfeit antiques before becoming engaged to a girl he doesn’t seem to like very much.
When he runs into an adult Boris (now played by Aneurin Barnard), the bird painting flies back into the story.
That’s a lot of plot and the heart, poetry and character development have been sacrificed.What’s left is a series of vignettes bolted together with little sense of momentum and few reasons to care.
The Goldfinch is pretty to look at but it never takes flight.