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MOVIE REVIEW: ‘The Goldfinch’ Goes Where Many Adaptations Before Have Gone and Fails
There’s an art to adaptation, but adaptations aren’t always art. Condensing, compressing, and pruning plots and subplots, characters and backstories, dialogue and exposition has to be balanced against the inherent limitations of the new medium (from novel to film, for example). It can be a daunting, nearly impossible challenge for any filmmaker, especially when the adaptation in question involves a sprawling, 800-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning, literary novel like Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel, The Goldfinch (her first since 2002’s equally celebrated The Little Friend and her third overall after The Secret History) and the adapters are screenwriter Peter Straughan (Our Brand is Crisis, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and director John Crowley (Brooklyn). It’s a challenge Straughan and Crowley should have left for other filmmakers to handle or better yet, for a high-profile, prestige miniseries from a major cable or streaming company. While faithful to the outlines, shapes, and contours of Tartt’s boldly ambitious novel, Straughan and Crowley delivers an overly reverential, ultimately tedious, turgid, flaccid adaptation.
Almost all of the signs pointed favorably to the kind of prestige adaptation that generally receives multiple Oscar nominations in January (if not actual Academy Award wins). In addition to Crowley — he directed Saoirse Ronan to an Oscar nomination for Brooklyn — and Straughan — likewise with his adaptation of John le Carré’s sharp-edged, densely intricate novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (a mini-masterpiece of compression and condensation) — The Goldfinch counts Nicole Kidman (a multiple Oscar nominee and winner), Tony and Emmy award-winning Jeffrey Wright (Westworld, Angels in America, Basquiat), Sarah Paulson (an Emmy Award winner for American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson), and Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver) in just the cast alone. Crowley also tapped acclaimed cinematographer and recent Academy Award winner Roger Deakins (Best Cinematography for Blade Runner 2049) to add his imitable stylistic flourishes (e.g., lighting, composition, choreography) to the adaptation. All the high-profile contributors and collaborators in or out of Hollywood, however, were apparently insufficient from saving The Goldfinch from the kind of numbing, stultifying mediocrity usually reserved for forgettable, disposable awards fodder, commercial…
