Checked out The Goldfinch, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Do they offer Pulitzers for movies? No? Well, that’s ok… this movie wouldn’t have won one anyway. It won’t win any Oscars either… or even Golden Globes. It might win a Razzie but it’s not corny or batshit enough… though it will win my near universal derision.
So The Goldfinch is about… umm… lemme see. It’s about a kid who survives a terrorist bombing at an art gallery but loses his mother. And… erm… the kid is kind of adopted by a rich family. And then his drunk dad returns and moves him to Las Vegas. And then… ummm… he meets a Ukranian friend. And also the movie is set years later when he’s an adult… and suicidal? Maybe? He meets and dates a couple girls. He’s maybe a drug addict (sometimes). And he’s an antiques dealer and counterfeiter… and he’s getting blackmailed… kind of. Because he stole a famous painting after the bomb went off as a kid. And that painting is, like, symbolic of his lost mom or something (and super valuable). By the time it decided to become a film about international gangsters and Chekhov’s (Fourth Act) gun is drawn in a particularly baffling bit of tonal whiplash, I was pretty much checked out.
And… ummm… this movie is mostly an overstuffed, distracted mess that wanders off to be about something else and occasionally remembers what it had once been about. Whatever this very shaggy, unfocused story is about probably worked great as an 800 page novel but fails terribly as a 2 1/2 prestige picture (that’s getting released in the doldrums at the end of Summer). If anyone saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, this movie reminds me a lot of how that movie failed (it, too, being a prestige pic based on a fancy novel). Only I didn’t want to throw my popcorn at the screen for this one so I guess that’s good… I just wanted to leave. A lot. Constantly.
Hey – a movie can be disoriented and confused about what story it wants to tell and maybe pull of being a good movie anyway. But this one doesn’t. It’s a very poorly told with actors who either don’t want to be there or who are actually trying to deliver but fail. It’s certainly looks great and has some pretty amazing imagery and the caliber of the cast is not at fault. They must have signed on knowing the rep of the book… we have Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Finn Wolfhard (from Stranger things – now Ukranian), Ansel Elgort, and a few other recognizable character actors.
I would normally credit a movie that is at least professionally made… and to an extent, I do. I mean, it’s not incompetent on anything but a script level… but oh boy did that script go sailing off into space. I can’t recommend this film even on a charity level… it’s just so long, so dazzlingly incapable of telling a consistent story, completely forgets plot points, and is so incredibly dull that it fails on even my attempts at acknowledging the silver linings. This is a pretty terrible movie.
Score: 58