Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Goldfinch’ on Amazon Prime, a Fascinatingly Disastrous Literary Adaptation

It’s possibly beneficial that The Goldfinch arrives on Amazon Prime when many people have a lot of time on their hands. It’s a 149-minute adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning 784-page novel, both guaranteed to eat up hours and hours, assuming one work inspires the consumption of the other. Of course, we’re here now to determine if the movie might transcend its status as a commercial and critical theatrical flop, and actually be worth a stream while we’re at home during a pandemic lockdown. Considering it was a near-universal and -historical commercial and critical theatrical flop, it sure faces an uphill climb.

THE GOLDFINCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Theo Decker (Ansel Elgort) sits in a messy Amsterdam hotel room, looking forlorn. He rinses blood from the cuffs of his shirt. In voiceover, he says how his mother is dead and it’s his fault — something that happened when he was still Young Theo (Oakes Fegley), maybe 12 years old. Flashback: They were in a museum, admiring Carel Fabritius’ 17th-century oil painting The Goldfinch when a terrorist’s bomb exploded, killing her and many others. He survived; I point this out to eliminate the possibility that this is a sneaky supernatural story. Not only is he not a ghost, but he made it out the door with The Goldfinch, and nobody noticed. He keeps the priceless painting for himself, wrapping it in newspaper and hiding it. It’s New York City, 2004.

Theo’s father is AWOL, so he stays with the Barbour family. He’s friends with Andy (Ryan Foust), and grows close with Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman); her soft, sympathetic eyes cut through the family’s old-money propriety. The cultured, sweatervested Theo fits right in with them, since they listen to classical music, and say yes sir and no sir, and Andy likes to play chess, and there isn’t an Xbox or even a TV in sight. For mysterious reasons to be explained later, Theo knocks on the door of an antique dealer and meets Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), who’s caring for Pippa (Aimee Laurence), a young girl with whom Theo has a deep connection: They made eye contact in the museum just before the explosion. She has a large scar on the side of her skull, and can no longer play or listen to music. Meanwhile, Hobie teaches Theo a thing or three about restoring antiques. 

On the eve of a Barbour summer on the sailboat in Maine, and just before they’re about to adopt him for good, Theo’s deadbeat dad and his girlfriend arrive, and in the Barbour house, they look like used Chevettes in the Ferrari lot. Larry (Luke Wilson) and Xandra (Sarah Paulson) — “With an X!” she says, chomping her gum — steal him back to their home in Las Vegas, where there’s a TV and a dog that always shits on the floor. Theo was anxious that airport security would find The Goldfinch in his backpack, but he got through OK. He makes a profound friend in Boris (Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things), a Russian ne’er-do-well who teaches him how to shoplift and drink vodka and crush pills and snort them.

Wait, you may be wondering, isn’t Ansel Elgort in this movie? Yes, he is. It flashes back and forth from his childhood to his adulthood, the latter of which is full of spoilers. I will say Adult Theo is now Hobie’s superstar antique salesman, and a high-functioning drug addict. People from his NYC childhood cycle back into his life; he’s in hot water for passing off an inauthentic antique as authentic, riling the skeevy buyer (Denis O’Hare). And The Goldfinch is still wrapped in an old edition of the New York Post, hidden in a storage unit. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was also based on a bestseller; was also about a boy dealing with the aftermath of tragedy in which a parent was lost; was also insufferably phony.

Performance Worth Watching: Kidman manages to find the kind heart of her character amidst the film’s awfulness. She gets to wear almost somewhat convincing old-lady makeup later in the movie, and works through it gamely, making the most of her few scenes.

Memorable Dialogue: Boris’ first impression of Theo is as follows: “Harry Potter!”

Theo’s reply? “F— you.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Goldfinch, the movie, is fastidiously terrible, chock full of bogus drama and arch literary drivel. Director John Crowley (whose Brooklyn was as wonderful as this is awful) makes a bold choice, crafting a dour and suffocating tone from a block of pure, grade-A bullshit. After The Fault in Our Stars, Baby Driver and Divergent, Elgort’s charisma continues to elude me; he’s bland as celery with water. I can’t say the movie is his fault when he’s dealing with a screenplay that’s a symphony of contrivances, false emotional notes and characters who are empty flourishes looking for a place to evaporate.

Despite being two-and-a-half hours long, and impossible to swallow thematically, it’s strangely sufferable; Roger Deakins’ cinematography ensures a level of visual detail that makes us feel immersed, as if we’re comfortably lounging in a cushy inflatable bouncy house. Thing is, the movie believes it’s an ornate mansion full of curiosities and idiosyncrasies, and golly is it overstuffed with characters dead-ending into subplot cul-de-sacs, until the final 15 minutes, when it suddenly becomes a suspense-thriller. For every good scene — usually those featuring Kidman — there are 10 that stumble club-footed through inauthentic, overwritten, emotionally vacuous scenes. The movie just never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever works. Ever.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Every year, there’s one or two paragons of bad cinema that stand out as fascinating disasters. The Goldfinch is absolutely one of them.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream <em>The Goldfinch</em> on Amazon Prime