The picture tells the story of an eager, owlish 13-year-old boy, Theodore Decker (Oakes Fegley), known as Theo, who lost his mother in a freak tragedy, when she was killed by a terrorist bomb at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the same time, even the smallest incident is freighted.
Instead, we’re watching a thematically organized but disjointed drama that sometimes feels like three separate movies jammed together. The movie sticks true to all of it, yet the scenes are no longer connected to each other by a voice. Tartt’s novel, told in the first person, was a passionate and suspenseful tapestry - of coming-of-age adventure and wide-eyed adult turmoil, of art history and neo-“Ripley’s Game” thriller. In the case of “The Goldfinch,” it’s a little of both. Yet there are occasions when the big screen can lay bare, almost unwittingly, what was precious and contrived about a book to begin with. Is that because they’ve simply failed to capture the magic of the book in question? More often than not, yes. For every adaptation of a relatively recent literary sensation that succeeds in being vibrantly true to the book and, at the same time, emerges as a rich dramatic entity all its own, like “No Country for Old Men,” there are a dozen others like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” “The Lovely Bones,” “Beloved,” “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” or - going back to the ’70s and ’80s - “Daniel” and “Ironweed.” These are movies that exist in the culture for a moment or two as prestige spectacles of adaptation, yet they’re films that few viewers wind up going back to, because they never achieve a life apart from the optics of the novels they were based on. We’ve seen this happen a hundred times before, just about always during awards season. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration. Yet what you experience isn’t the book, exactly it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. Roger Deakins’ luscious cinematography lends the movie the creamy clarity of a dream. Watching this faithful-in-a-literal-way yet somehow skittery cinematic transcription of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 art-mystery novel, you can tell that the director, John Crowley (“Brooklyn”), and the screenwriter, Peter Straughan (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), did everything in their power to get the novel up on screen. “ The Goldfinch” is this year’s entry in what has become, by now, a time-honored genre: the high-toned awards-bait literary adaptation that, for all the skill and care and ambition that’s been lavished on it, doesn’t quite work.
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