The Goldfinch review: a dithering, arduous shredding of Donna Tartt's doorstep novel

Dir: John Crowley. Cast: Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, Ashleigh Cummings, Willa Fitzgerald, Denis O'Hare, Boyd Gaines. 15 cert, 149 mins

How do you solve a problem like The Goldfinch? Published in 2013, Donna Tartt’s nearly-800-page novel won the Pulitzer Prize while starkly dividing readers – it was by far the most love-it-or-hate-it book of her career to date. If this tale of art and alienation among New York’s elite felt weirdly thin for such a breeze block, the story’s frustrations only intensify in the higgledy-piggledy film version.

Tartt’s book has been put through a grater, then reassembled into a wet prestige patty of a picture, all dainty set dressing and limp psychology. Who’s it actually for? Because it has shredded everything that originally worked, it won’t please anyone who adored the book, let alone the considerable sector of people who gave up on it midway. Dithering forward while making ineffectual use of its entire cast, the film all but gives up on itself.

Director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) both have strong form in the literary adaptation game, so it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that it’s Tartt’s story which has led them up the garden path. Far from fixing it for the screen, though, they’ve muddled it yet further, tripping themselves up with some bafflingly needless creative decisions.

The film’s mistakes are epitomised by how it treats the unexplained terrorist attack in New York’s Met, where everything begins in Tartt’s novel. It’s here, trapped with his mother when a bomb goes off, that 13-year-old Theo Decker (Wonderstruck's Oakes Fegley) survives, caked in rubble, and makes the fateful decision to sneak out with a famous oil painting – the titular bird, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, the year he died.

Theo's motives for purloining this masterpiece at the moment of his mother’s death are meant to be psychologically mysterious; his motives for keeping it into adulthood, long past the patience many had with Tartt’s plot, could be charitably described as more mysterious still.

But the film keeps no handle on any of these mysteries, because it splinters Tartt’s highly cinematic museum sequence into random bits and pieces, just fragments of a life-changing event in skittish flashback. The suspenseful details of Theo’s escape are wholly sacrificed – one missing piece among many, making you wonder if a long-form miniseries was really the way to go.

Even as we’re jumping forward in time eight years, with Theo now played as a smug antiques dealer by Ansel Elgort, we’re bedevilled still by not getting to the bottom of what happened – in fact, we never really do. First Theo is adopted by the wealthy parents of a schoolfriend (Nicole Kidman and Boyd Gaines), then trained as an apprentice by a kindly furniture restorer called Hobie (Jeffrey Wright, doing rumpled wisdom yet again), whose business partner died in the blast.

For years, which pass by in weightless transition, he’s whisked off to a dusty desert home near Vegas by his deadbeat dad (Luke Wilson) and trashy stepmom (a rare misfiring character from Sarah Paulson), who mainly want their hands on his inheritance.

The book’s liveliest character was Theo’s manic, tormented Ukrainian friend Boris (Finn Wolfhard, then Aneurin Barnard), whose active role in the painting’s fate gave Tartt a chance to refocus near the end. Neither of these actors offer more than a heavily accent-coached external sketch, though. You’re even less envious of Kidman, submitting to wrinkly old-lady make-up in a frankly boring role, and debatably the least effective of all the supporting players.

But the vacuum which really sucks any life out of this experience has a name, and it is Theo. As portrayed here, he’s such an exact product of his upbringing and traumatised experience – drug addiction is a given – that zero personality comes off him at any stage. Fegley and Elgort – typed together, they sound like a pair of goblins out of Labyrinth – match up perfectly in showing the formation of a hollow man, a cagey nonentity who nullifies any hope of our caring. “Look at us now!” says Pippa (Ashleigh Cummings), another bomb survivor, when they’re reunited for more prissy chitchat about Beethoven and dresser repair. “Almost exactly like people!” Well, vaguely.

The film pours its actors and other resources down a hole, including wastefully fine photography by Roger Deakins, whose Amsterdam nightscapes and blue-meets-orange Nevada sunsets make you mourn the puniness of the project around them. Almost everything feels like boutique wallpaper, or one of the cherrywood antique chairs Wright’s Hobie likes stroking: a flawed object with a story, maybe, but one we barely get to contemplate in the film’s haste.

It’s a feature of certain failed adaptations – The Lovely Bones (2009) springs gruesomely to mind, as does Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) – that they’re long in all the wrong places, or seem to fritter away their running times while barely making headway as functional stories. The Goldfinch tries to build to a point by handing Barnard’s Boris a crashingly banal Cliff’s Notes digest of a speech – “Myaybe syumtimes gyud can cyum from byaad” is the general drift.

Not much good has come from it here. While Tartt was basically contemplating the old saw that life is short and art long – “ars longa, vita brevis”, quoth the Latin aphorism – getting there in 800 pages was a self-defeatingly arduous way to prove her point. As a film, full of borrowed culture it reveres for towering immortally over our follies, it barely looks set to outlive the autumn.

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