The Goldfinch (2019)

(On Cable TV, May 2020) The truth about filmmaking is that so many people are involved and so many things can go wrong that it’s almost a miracle when something good comes out of the process: Good movies are the exception, not the default. This is true no matter your budget, your actors or your source material. While you can try to stack the deck with seasoned professionals, the result is still often a game of luck. (And now you know why Hollywood loves the sequels.) So it is that with The Goldfinch, producers certainly did get the best of everything—an award-winning novel, a seasoned screenwriter, a handful of great actors, Roger Deakins doing cinematography, enough budget to do justice to the story’s globe-spanning narrative, and all of the other production niceties afforded to a prestige drama. (I’m sure the catering must have been really nice.) This thing is taking us to the Oscars, they must have thought. And yet, and yet—nobody knows anything and, in the end, The Goldfinch is a messy, unwieldy adaptation of a novel that probably should have been best handled as a TV series (if at all) than as an unfocused, herky-jerky two-hours-and-a-half train wreck. The weird result blends genre thrills and pretentious narrative conceits in an attempt at becoming a so-called serious drama. In this regard, it reminded me a lot of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—along with sharing terrorism plot points and Jeffrey Wright—although I suspect that The Goldfinch is far too ludicrous to age as gracefully. If you’re looking for solace while you’re stuck in the film’s interminable length and ludicrous plot points, you can at least point at the actors, some of them used against type (Luke Wilson), others in more familiar characters (Wright) but none of them are any more comfortable with the results, as they are prisoners of a script that jerks characters around like puppets. While The Goldfinch is not strictly bad (it looks far too good for that), it’s just not very pleasant to watch most of the time. Even the structure tries for a collage and ends up with what feels like undisciplined flashbacks. But worse of all is the feeling that The Goldfinch had Best-Picture-of-the-Year ambitions and then, through hubris or complacency, completely wasted everything it had at its disposal.