The Goldfinch fails to adapt but Donna Tartt’s DNA survives

By Katherine Monk

Even Donna Tartt’s novel was an audience splitter. Either you loved the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel about a boy struggling to accept the death of his mother in a bombing, or you thought it was an overrated melodrama that obsessed over antique furniture and fell apart in the final chapters.

I’m part of the former group. I loved the book. I didn’t want it to end — even if the final third of the story felt too forced and false. I got lost in the elegant and evocative prose, the feelings and the characters. As a result, John Crowley’s filmed adaptation of the novel was the one film I was most looking forward to seeing at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

I loved the book. I didn’t want it to end — even if the final third of the story felt too forced and false. I got lost in the elegant and evocative prose, the feelings and the characters.

Crowley, the man who directed the tender period drama Brooklyn, seemed to have just the right touch. He can find the unspoken suffering, and quietly lay a dramatic foundation for a complex construction of events, which is exactly what Tartt’s long, globe-trotting book demanded.

The one thing he didn’t have was time. To fit the whole book into a feature film, screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy) had to cut Tartt’s body of words into parts, amputating what he deemed unessential, and cramming it all into the frame in a rather formulaic form using standard Hollywood devices.

The movie opens with a voiceover from the grown Theodore Decker (Ansel Elgort), which immediately pulls us into the thick of the plot. In the first few moments, we learn Theo lost his mother as a young boy while they were visiting The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had gone to take another look at The Anatomy Lesson while he was lost in romantic reverie: Staring at a redheaded girl named Pippa (Aimee Laurence), who was gazing at Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch.

The Goldfinch was the only piece to survive a great explosion that destroyed the painter’s body of work. Like Theo, it survived disaster. And like Theo, it depicts a small, fragile creature held captive: The bird is tethered to its perch, unable to escape, stuck in one place for all eternity.

The Goldfinch symbolizes Theo’s suffering, as well as his freakish uniqueness, and so boy and painting begin an unlikely journey that takes them from the Fifth Avenue mansions of Manhattan to the dusty subdivisions of Las Vegas, to the labyrinths of debauchery snaking through Europe.

The book did a marvellous job of establishing a sense of place with long descriptions of interiors, so when it was time for Theo to move, it felt as jarring for the reader as it did for Theo. Straughan’s script short-circuits this sense of dislocation by going back and forth through time, ensuring we never feel attached to any place at all. As a result, there’s a subconscious emotional gap. Symbolically, we don’t feel Theo — or the painting — have a true place to call home. There is no empty spot on the wall that needs filling, which means we’re lacking half the dramatic tension built into Tartt’s long novel.

The book did a marvellous job of establishing a sense of place with long descriptions of interiors, so when it was time for Theo to move, it felt as jarring for the reader as it did for Theo. Straughan’s script short-circuits this sense of dislocation by going back and forth through time, ensuring we never feel attached to any place at all.

Instead, we get what feels like a selection of random vignettes that propel the plot on a practical level. We watch Theo move in with the Barbours, a well-to-do New York family headed by the emotionally inaccessible matriarch played by Nicole Kidman. She and young Theo (Oakes Fegley) create the most powerful scenes in the whole movie, finding the creases of need in each other without words, articulating the longing and emptiness that defines the film.

It’s a solid start, and Crowley’s yellow-cast frames soaked in incandescent light capture the hue of the painting, the glow of an ancient veneer, and the warmth of a love-filled memory. Things degrade when we hit the harsh sun of the Las Vegas suburbs, where we enter a sand-filled subdivision full of foreclosures where Theo is reunited with his deadbeat Dad (Luke Wilson), his new girlfriend (Sarah Paulson) and the neglected little white dog Popper. In Vegas, he meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a globe-trotting teen with a foreign accent who introduces Theo to drugs and alcohol, and the thrill of subversion and unashamed scamming.

The Vegas part works thanks to some outstanding scenes from Paulson and Wilson, who embody the morally vacant narcissism that is Las Vegas, and the worst of the American way. After that, however, when we rejoin the adult narrator as the fully grown Theo (Ansel Elgort), The Goldfinch seems to disintegrate in our grasp.

Behind his designer glasses and bespoke suits, Elgort lacks the empathetic gaze that let us warm up to the earlier incarnation of Theo. The magical connection between the Fabritius tableau and the tragic boy vaporizes as Crowley and Straughan struggle to fit everything into the final act of the film.

Thanks to the recurring presence of Jeffrey Wright as Hobie, the antique furniture restorer who helps put Theo back together, fans of the book will find enough traces of the prose experience to forgive the big mess of a finale. Wright’s Hobie becomes the symbolic Noah (an image reaffirmed by the inclusion of an antique folk carving of Noah’s Ark in Hobie’s workshop).

Behind his designer glasses and bespoke suits, Elgort lacks the empathetic gaze that let us warm up to the earlier incarnation of Theo. The magical connection between the Fabritius tableau and the tragic boy vaporizes as Crowley and Straughan struggle to fit everything into the final act of the film.

The flood of emotions is always threatening Theo, lapping at the edges of his memory, eager to pull him under as he contemplates the utter lack of love in his life. Wright’s presence becomes the one thing we, and Theo, can hold on to when everything else is falling apart.

Yet, even that gets a little soggy when the romantic storyline with Pippa bleeds into the mix. There’s no doubt Crowley and Straughan were doing their best to remain true to Tartt’s book as they hacked it up and stuffed it into a movie box. They clearly tried to curate the best scenes to capture the sense of emotional imprisonment, but for the film to do the book justice, every single thread needed to be flawless. There was no room for a leading man that leaves us ambivalent, or a best friend that feels like a cartoon character with a fake and completely irritating accent.

As a fan of the book, there was enough of Tartt’s melancholy mood and pathetic stabs at love to capture the essence of what I found so alluring. By the same token, everything I disliked about the book in its closing chapters were only made worse by a lazy, and nearly incomprehensible conclusion.

@katherinemonk

Main image: Nicole Kidman and Oakes Fegley in John Crowley’s adaptation of The Goldfinch.

THE EX-PRESS, September 13, 2019

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