The Goldfinch review: This bird don’t fly

The Goldfinch may be a Pulitizer Prize-winning novel but John Crowley’s adaptation is a flat morass of nothing with an undynamic lead.

Published in 2013, Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch took the book world by storm. The next year, it secured the most coveted literary prize of all, the Pulitzer. So, not surprisingly, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling for an adaptation. And in 2015 director John Crowley was riding high off his highly sensitive and wondrous feature, Brooklyn.

Nominated for three Oscars, Crowley could write his own ticket at that point and decided to turn his sights towards adapting The Goldfinch for the screen. Nearly all of the film’s problems extend to its script, credited to Peter Straughan, helmer behind the laughably bad The Snowman.  But The Goldfinch is both wildly pretentious and exceedingly dumb, cold and passionless, with a leading man who doesn’t know what tone to reach for.

Theo Decker (played by Oakes Fegley as a child and Ansel Elgort as an adult) is left adrift after being one of the few survivors of a bombing in a New York art gallery. His mother was killed in the blast, leaving Theo to go to a series of new homes. But in the wake of his mother’s death, Theo holds a secret about a painting that went missing from the gallery after the explosion.

There are fleeting moments where The Goldfinch shows why the book has connected with people. Its appreciation of art as a tangible example of immortality; the struggles we have to escape becoming the people who raised us. The problem is Straughan’s screenplay is so poorly written that nothing Crowley or cinematographer Roger Deakins do can fix it, short of making everything look as beautiful as possible. In a film all about “life, eh,” there isn’t a whole lot in it.

Our first introduction to Theo is the affectless monotone of Elgort. If you can’t get over his opening narration, the movie’s 2 1/2 runtime will be like poking needles in your eyeballs. Elgort’s “last night I dreamed of Manderley again” moment involves his mother, whose death is both his excuse for being who he is and the crutch that propels the rest of the movie from A to B. There’s no overt discussion of what happened in the gallery; the novel says it’s a terrorist bombing, though you can feel the movie is too afraid to make that declarative.

Theo travels to the first of three homes. The Barbours, led by the cool yet nameless Mrs. Barbour (played by Nicole Kidman) is the apotheosis of New York pretension. They have Colonial-era portraits on the wall and travel to Maine for the summer. These scenes only serve to showcase the talent of Fegley, who finds humanity and warmth within Theo’s shattered soul. When Theo bonds with the Barbour’s youngest son, Andy (Ryan Foust), the two performers are able to illustrate a close bond. Fegley conveys that Theo is almost afraid to laugh and bond with Andy, a possible betrayal of trust to his mother. Foust steals nearly every scene he’s in as a little boy who’s an outsider in his own home, generally separated from everyone by doors.

Yet the Barbours also illustrate Straughan’s poor writing. An utterly laughable scene sees a character we’ve never met come in and start yelling, culminating with the most unintentionally funny series of table slaps that just….ends. Why is it there? To explain the character coming back in the third act. That’s a problem that runs through the entirety of The Goldfinch: characters exist purely to bridge the gaps in scenes, but to never fill them. We never see any love between Mrs. Barbour and Theo, short of Kidman and others telling him he was their favorite. Theo’s relationship with the snooty Kitsy (Willa Fitzgerald) always feels like a relationship of convenience leaving the man’s presumed sadness – manifesting as a scrunched up face – already disingenuous.

Theo’s removal from the Barbours takes The Goldfinch to its liveliest section. Theo moves to Las Vegas with his scheming father Larry (Luke Wilson) and Larry’s selfish girlfriend Xandra, “with an X” (Sarah Paulson). Had this been the entirety of The Goldfinch, watching Theo deal with a manipulative father willing to steal his son’s identity to get wealthy and an apathetic quasi-stepmother it might have been worthwhile. Fegley, Wilson, and Paulson are spectacular, creating a tense atmosphere that’s on par with the work of Ibsen. Unfortunately, it lasts about 25 minutes, pushed aside in favor of developing Theo’s relationship with an equally lonely boy named Boris, played by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard with a Russian accent learned in Central Casting.

From there The Goldfinch becomes a routine presentation of Fate, with a capital “F,” throwing Theo back into the lives of everyone he’s ever met, many whose lives seemed to become worse after his leaving. If you’ve watched Collateral Beauty or Life Itself – neither of which should be a point of comparison for any movie – you’ve seen how this plays out, albeit without the titular painting (treated more like a MacGuffin than anything else) at its center.

The Goldfinch is a half-dead tale of mourning beautifully, featuring elegant cinematography and stilted acting. Fegley, Paulson, and Foust are the standouts, but the bigger names are left to just stand there dead-eyed looking for emotion. The Goldfinch doesn’t sing so much as it sits in its cage refusing to fly.