TIFF 2019: The Goldfinch

*/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Donna Tartt
directed by John Crowley

by Angelo Muredda How do you solve a problem like The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's infinitely Instagrammable, stridently "literary" Pulitzer Prize winner? That's the riddle behind Brooklyn helmer John Crowley's flop-sweating adaptation, which strives to be faithful to an unruly text but has little formal bombast of its own to justify the second pass. Chasing after a serious tome of dubious merit, the sort of thing that has been called Dickensian largely because it involves a male orphan at the mercy of kind strangers, the nouveau Goldfinch--not to be confused with the so-named painting its protagonist snatches from the rubble of a terrorist attack at the Met in both versions--gets all the warmed-over thematic pronouncements and outré stock characters of the novel and none of the confidence. That makes it one of the most conspicuously flat prestige failures in recent memory, a film only a festival audience paying for the honour of seeing Nicole Kidman gingerly waving up to the balcony could love.

Kidman plays Samantha Barbour, a frosty socialite who over time warms by a few degrees to her adoptive charge, Theo (Oakes Fegley), a young classmate of her foppish son Andy (Ryan Foust) who needs a new home after the aforementioned catastrophe leaves him motherless. Just as the bookish and nattily bespectacled Theo has started to fit in and befriended local antique shop owner Hobie (Jeffrey Wright)--as well as Hobie's own ward, and Theo's apparent soulmate, Pippa (Aimee Laurence), who also survived the attack--Theo's estranged, deadbeat dad Larry (Luke Wilson) spirits him away to arid Las Vegas, where he becomes fast friends and recreational drug-snorting partners with Ukrainian lush Boris (Finn Wolfhard). Before we know it, eight years pass, and Theo (now played by Ansel Elgort, bringing an incongruous meathead energy to the proceedings despite his own bona fides as a child of the culturati) is back in New York and a full partner with Hobie, at least until a false antique sale and a rumoured resurfacing of his stolen artwork put the business in danger.

This geographic, temporal, and generic hopscotching--which starts in Stephen Daldry territory and lands in the violent art world intrigue of a Tom Ripley novel before racing back to Daldry, all while estranged from world-historical events that might clarify the timeline--is at first only confusing and then, once we're trapped with Elgort's uncanny replica of Theo, enervating. Unconvincing to begin with in the novel, a third-act pivot to praising the romantic heroism of people who save delicate things from oblivion feels even more grafted on here after such an aimless, picaresque set-up that has nothing much to say about either artists or patrons. A soporific affair where good actors in questionable makeup stand and deliver undigested passages from the Martian textual country from which they come, The Goldfinch falls just shy of Brechtian alienation, pulling its emotional weight strictly through literal song cues that shrug out what people are supposedly feeling, from "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" to, most incredibly, "Everything in Its Right Place." If only. Programme: Gala Presentations