The Goldfinch
Director: John Crowley
Cast: Oakes Fegley, Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeff Wright, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson
Though its IMDB summarization seems simple — “A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” — this plot one-liner of The Goldfinch doesn’t do it justice. Director John Crowley’s filmic adaptation of Donna Tartt’s acclaimed novel is no simple affair.
“The Goldfinch” boasts a high-profile cast — Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Jeff Wright, Sarah Paulson and Luke Wilson among others — and incredible source material, but Crowley’s cinematic rendition had trouble translating a complicated plot into a film which reveals itself without confusion and uneven pacing. And with various actors playing the same characters at different ages, it proved hard to make this film a smoothly-unveiled, aesthetically successful two hour-and-26-minute long narrative.
Adding to its challenges, “The Goldfinch” had a sprawling narrative, which unfolded across several time periods. Filling an 800-page book, Tartt’s distinctive literary voice spurred transformed it into a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — a thing which is notoriously difficult to transfer to film. Something like “The Goldfinch” might have been perfect for seasonal TV series but wrangling such an adult drama into a theater-length feature is daunting if not next to impossible. There so many conflicted characters with rich story lines that it forces a director to make tough choices as to which one, with its own sub-plot line, to favor over another.
So while Crowley was able to make a successful film adaptation of another family saga, Brooklyn — the book by Colm Tóibín — which garnered Oscar noms for itself and its star Saoirse Ronan, this new project proved to be far more of a challenge.
Though “The Goldfinch” doesn’t quite make the grade for its creators, there are some fine performances to witness — particularly those delivered by Elgort and Kidman — and especially by Aneurin Barnard and Finn Wolfhard (as the young Boris), the two actors who play Boris Pavlikovsky, a morally conflicted son of a Ukrainian émigré who becomes Theo’s close friend. At times, Corkman Crowley succeeds, but in other ways, it’s not quite as fulfilling as one would hope. Still, there’s lots of intriguing and intellectually flights of fancy throughout.