Shifting from old, elegant New York parlours to the vast barren sands of the Nevada desert is wonderful. The extreme set changes throughout also helps to keep you visually engaged. There’s plenty of interesting lighting and camerawork used to make seemingly normal, mundane spaces, feel far more unique and even otherworldly at times. On the other hand, the film’s cinematography is actually quite good.
The end result feels like you’re watching three separate movies jammed together, which makes it tonally very awkward. It doesn’t really know what story it wants to tell. A romance subplot takes place for a few scenes, and then it finishes as a crime caper again? It feels like they tried to come at this movie from too many different angles, leaving it a confusing mess. It has the setup of a crime film, then it becomes a coming-of-age story for a while. I may have haphazardly summarised the film towards the end there, but truth be told, this plot is such a mess. Then, oddly, in the last thirty minutes, The Goldfinch turns into Goldeneye and suddenly we’re going on a globetrotting painting stealing crusade while shooting up some no-name thugs. Some other things happen, friendships are made and families are broken.
Soon after the attack, Theo gets taken in by an aristocratic family, then he gets taken away to his father’s house in Las Vegas. In the midst of the dust and debris, Theo tries to search for his mum and he also decides to take a famous painting, The Goldfinch. His mother, however, wasn’t so lucky and she, unfortunately, passes away. The Goldfinch is the story of Theodore Decker, a thirteen-year-old boy who’s just survived a bombing attack while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I never heard of it before the movie came out, and I don’t get paid enough to do that amount of research (take that as a hint to give me a raise, FilmBunker). Admittedly, I have not read the book myself. It most notably won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if that’s not enough of a reason to adapt this book into a film… then I don’t know what is. The Goldfinch is an award-winning novel written by Donna Tartt that was published back in 2013. This is one of the many issues in adapting a novel to screen-it’s hard to convey the emotional brevity of a situation when engaging characters are met with wet-blanket performances. He’s not completely unwatchable but so far every performance I’ve seen him attempt is just emotionally constipated, and his work in The Goldfinch confirms this. I’m pretty ready to concede to the fact that Ansel Elgort just can’t act. The Goldfinch Directed by: John Crowley Runtime: 149 minutes
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