Review: The Goldfinch

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Donna Tartt's 700-plus-page Pulitzer Prize winning opus "The Goldfinch," surely one of the decade's greatest novels, is the type of work that would seem to be difficult to translate to the screen. Filled with numerous characters and multiple settings over a period of years, the novel also features some powerful thematic concepts - from survivor's grief to the idea of great works of art being immortal, whereas human life is fleeting - that are highly effective when they are explored in great length through the written word.

Alas, while John Crowley's film version is able to stuff in about as much of the book's plot as possible, it doesn't quite catch the novel's essence. The picture has its moments, but entire relationships and storylines from the novel are reduced to a mere scene or two, and it's missing the magic that made the book so special. The film's fragmented storytelling devices don't exactly help either.

As it opens, young Theo Decker (Oakes Fergley) has experienced a tragedy. He survived, but his mother was killed, during a bombing at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and has now been adopted by a wealthy Manhattan family, of which the matriarch, Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), has taken a shine to him. He also bonds with the Barbour's endearingly dorky son, Andy.

But as we come to learn, Theo harbors a secret. After the bomb went off at the museum, Theo met a dying man who gave him a ring to deliver to an antiques shop in the city. The man also convinced Theo to abscond with Carel Fabritius' centuries-old painting with which this film shares the title. That painting had, ironically, been among the few works of the artist that survived a fire, and Theo steals it because, as we later learn, his mother was taken by it.

In Fabritius' painting, as it is mentioned in the book, a small goldfinch is sitting atop its feeder, but its foot is chained and, therefore, it is never quite free. Theo is also chained - to his past, his family and the secret that he keeps from everyone else about the stolen painting.

The ring given to him by the dying man leads him to the doorstep of Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), an antiques restorer who takes him on as an apprentice and shows him his trade. Hobie's partner, the man who gave Theo the ring, had been the guardian of a girl named Pippa (Aimee Laurence), with whom Theo becomes smitten.

Circumstances intervene and Theo is forced to leave New York City to live with his ne'er do well father (Luke Wilson) and his girlfriend (Sarah Paulson) in Las Vegas. It is there he meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a lanky Ukrainian kid who introduces Theo to drugs, although the pair's friendship is stable compared to that of Theo's relationship with Wilson's deadbeat gambler dad.

The picture jumps back and forth between Theo's younger years and his young adulthood in New York City. Ansel Elgort plays the older Theo, who finds himself in trouble after attempting to pass off inauthentic pieces of furniture as antiques. This discovery leads one jilted customer to investigate Theo and put the pieces together about his being at the scene of the museum's bombing and the theft of the painting. Meanwhile, Theo is engaged to the daughter of the Barbours, with whom he has reconnected, and Boris pops back up as a low level criminal.

In other words, yes, there's a whole lot going on in "The Goldfinch," which suited the novel well. Tartt's wonderful book had a Dickensian feel to it and allowed readers to get to know its characters well over the course of its 784 pages. The novel culminates with a lovely passage in which Theo contemplates "the history of people who have loved beautiful things and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire."

In one of the film's better moments, this concept is expressed by Hobie, who scolds Theo for stealing "The Goldfinch," telling him that human life goes by quickly, but Fabritius' painting is immortal and was, therefore, not his to take. However, where Tartt had pages to fill with the concept, the film only gives it a brief, albeit moving, line or two of dialogue.

Therein lies the problem with Crowley's film - it's too devoted to relaying every bit of plot from the novel, but it's missing the novel's essence. There's too much going on during the film's two-and-a-half hour running time and the result is that the exposition overshadows all else. The film has its merits - some good performances, especially by Fegley and Wright - but it pales in comparison to its remarkable source material.