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The Goldfinch review: A disastrous translation of Donna Tartt’s book to the big screen

The film is handsomely staged and filled with all the extravagant tragedy we’d expect from a film about rich, sad New Yorkers, but it’s a pretty tiresome thing to watch

Clarisse Loughrey

Thursday 26 September 2019 12:20 BST

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The Goldfinch - Trailer

Dir: John Crowley. Starring: Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, and Nicole Kidman. 15 cert, 149 mins

There’s a morbid curiosity surrounding The Goldfinch’s disastrous translation to the big screen. It’s a cinematic puzzle box. We poke and prod it, hoping to magically uncover the answer as to why a film with everything in its favour could turn so sour. The film’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Donna Tartt. It has a talented director in the form of John Crowley, who already succeeded beautifully in transposing a book to the big screen with 2015’s Brooklyn. Its cast – Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Finn Wolfhard – has serious clout. It even has the talents of Roger Deakins, the best cinematographer working today. But, after it landed at the Toronto Film Festival with a leaden thud, its measly US opening of $2.6m turned out to be one of the worst in cinematic history.

It’s not an easy to task to pinpoint what exactly about The Goldfinch feels so limp. Certainly you could say it was felled by its own ambitions. At nearly 800 pages long, Tartt’s book is weighty enough to be used as a weapon, allowing its author the luxury of writing both a sprawling odyssey and a lengthy psychological examination of its lead character. Theo – played by Oakes Fegley as a child, Ansel Elgort as an adult – is a survivor of the terrorist bombing at the Met that killed his mother. From the rubble, he salvages her favourite painting, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (a real work created in 1654, currently housed in The Hague). It becomes a tortured kind of talisman for Theo, as he carries it with him through the various misfortunes of his life.

25 books that should have never been made into films

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1/2625 books that should have never been made into films

25 books that should have never been made into films

Warner Bros Pictures/Universal Pictures/New Line Cinema

25 books that should have never been made into films

Dune (1984)

Dune was never going to be an easy book to turn into a two-hour action movie – and David Lynch’s attempt is proof that it should be best left alone. The director's adaptation is a nonsensical, deeply convoluted disaster that wastes an enjoyably oddball cast. It's the only one of Lynch's films the director has publicly disowned. Still, hopes are high that next year’s version from Arrival director Denis Villeneuve, starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, will somehow be better.

Universal Pictures

25 books that should have never been made into films

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

Fresh off the success of bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Warner Bros bought the rights from Tom Wolfe for a staggering $750,000. Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffiths were both (mis)cast in the lead roles after director Brian De Palma's preferred choices turned him down. The filmmaker himself struggled to spin the 1990 production's many plates amid reports of rising on-set troubles that were all witnessed and documented in Julie Salmon's follow-up book, The Devil's Candy.

Warner Bros

25 books that should have never been made into films

Billy Bathgate (1991)

1991 gangster film Billy Bathgate, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman, did no justice to EL Doctorow's beloved 1989 novel. With the efforts of Oscar-winning Kramer vs Kramer director Robert Benton and a script by Tom Stoppard, the film had all the ingredients to become as good as The Godfather, Scarface, and Goodfellas. Instead, it was a hollow adaptation, largely because all the magic was lost with the absence of the central character's narration – a huge reason behind the novel's success.

Buena Vista Pictures

25 books that should have never been made into films

The Scarlet Letter (1995)

The Scarlet Letter (1995) is ranked as one of the worst book adaptations ever made and for good reason. Described by DH Lawrence as “a perfect work of the American imagination," the book was handed a Hollywood makeover that found itself the brunt of ridicule after flopping at the box office. Director Roland Joffé strayed so far from Nathaniel Hawthorne's pages that what should have been an enticing romance became an extremely throwaway erotic drama.

Buena Vista Pictures

25 books that should have never been made into films

Battlefield Earth (2000)

To be fair, few would be able to turn L Ron Hubbard’s allegedly Scientology-inspired Battlefield Earth (2000) into something decent. This John Travolta-with-dreadlocks epic has since gone down in “Worst Movies Ever” infamy, effectively ending Travolta’s mainstream movie career and destroying Barry Pepper’s before it even started.

Warner Bros Pictures

25 books that should have never been made into films

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)

Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin was one of the biggest literary successes of the 1990s, but the 2001 film version – from the same British company that made Notting Hill – lost all traces of the novel's heart and soul. The dialogue is disastrous and lead stars Nicolas Cage (Captain Corelli) and Penélope Cruz (Pelagia) lack any chemistry. It may look pretty, but this adaptation was a complete mistake.

Miramax Films

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The Time Machine (2002)

The beauty of HG Wells’s 1895 science fiction novella The Time Machine was lost amid all the CGI in this insipid 2002 adaptation, which was directed by Wells's great-grandson, Simon. Everything featured, including Guy Pearce's lead performance, is wooden apart from the copper time travel contraption at the heart of the story.

Warner Bros Pictures

25 books that should have never been made into films

Dreamcatcher (2003)

There have been just as many disappointing Stephen King adaptations as there have been successful ones, but Dreamcatcher sits at the bottom of that list. The talent was present (Damian Lewis! Morgan Freeman! Timothy Olyphant!), but the end product never once correlates to anything at all decent. The film's late-stage swerve into monster movie territory is nothing short of dreadful.

Warner Bros Pictures

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Enduring Love (2004)

Before he took on the role of 007, Daniel Craig starred in this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel about people whose lives become entangled after witnessing a deadly accident. While Craig’s performance as college lecturer Joe, along with Rhys Ifans as Jed – the man who becomes obsessed with him – are convincing, the film allows little time for character development and suffers because of it.

Pathé Distribution

25 books that should have never been made into films

The Perfect Catch (2005)

Nick Hornby adaptations don’t inherently need to be set in the UK (the John Cusack-starring High Fidelity, if you like that sort of thing, is something of a classic, after all), but they do need to translate the fussy, infuriating male neuroses of his novels. The Perfect Catch is the 2005 US adaptation of Hornby’s Fever Pitch, released a decade after Colin Firth starred in his own British adaptation, and transforms the source material into a more throwaway and uninteresting big-city romcom. Drew Barrymore, in a 'girlfriend’ role significantly beefed up in comparison to Hornby’s novel, is great, but watching her try and source chemistry with a shrill and unappealing Jimmy Fallon (in one of his rare, pre-talk show acting roles) is harrowing.

20th Century Fox

25 books that should have never been made into films

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

The Da Vinci Code is a stinker of the highest order. Its sequels, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), are also awful films, but the reason the initial Dan Brown adaptation ranks as the worst is because the others wouldn't have existed had this one not been so successful.

Sony Pictures Releasing

25 books that should have never been made into films

Eragon (2006)

20th Century Fox clearly wanted Eragon to be their answer to Harry Potter, but the terrible reviews stopped that plan dead in its tracks. Eragon is the worst kind of fantasy adaptation – one where all of the source materials' sense of fantastical vibrancy disappears during its translation to the big screen.

20th Century Fox

25 books that should have never been made into films

Running with Scissors (2006)

Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors consistently walks a dangerous tightrope between manic farce and adolescent horror tale. Ryan Murphy’s adaptation, released in 2006, collapses beneath such a task. You can see why Murphy, for his feature film debut, would be attracted to a tale of neurotic family dysfunction and sexual awakening as they are themes that crop up in many of his TV shows (Glee, American Horror Story, etc). But this adaptation is a tonal misfire from start to finish, despite the best efforts of an all-star cast that includes Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood and Brian Cox. It’s no wonder this sunk without a trace.

TriStar Pictures

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The Golden Compass (2007)

In another case of Hollywood throwing money at something in the belief that will be enough, Philip Pullman’s superb His Dark Materials trilogy – or rather, the first book Northern Lights – was condensed into an agonising mess of CGI and hammy acting in 2007's The Golden Compass. Much of the blame went to the fact that Hollywood, where God is thanked above anyone else at the Oscars, would likely be uncomfortable handling material that was so critical of the Catholic church. It also suffered by trying to condense an overwhelming amount of information into the opening few scenes. A forthcoming BBC adaptation starring James McAvoy and Lin-Manuel Miranda looks far more promising.

Entertainment Film Distributors

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The Time Traveller's Wife (2009)

Where to start with this disaster of a film? Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller's Wife is beautifully and convincingly written, but there's nothing convincing about its adaptation. Producers thought casting two major Hollywood stars was a good idea, but Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana had zero chemistry.

New Line Cinema

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Cloud Atlas (2012)

Cloud Atlas (2012) is by no means a disaster, but it's meandering plot lines, sketchy pacing and often questionable acting (Hanks has never been dodgier) do David Mitchell's sprawling, inventive novel a disservice. Still, it's an enjoyable Wachowskis romp that features Hugh Grant as a cannibal tribesman, so it has that going for it.

Focus Features

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The Hobbit (2012-2014)

Fans of The Hobbit did not expect the novel, so short and sweet and set in such a familiar and adored world, to be messed up by The Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson – but that’s exactly what happened. While the trilogy of Hobbit films were a box-office success, they came under fire from critics for stretching the book's material too thin. Third outing, The Battle of Five Armies, was the worst received of all three.

Warner Bros Pictures

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The Book Thief (2013)

The film adaptation of the profoundly moving and dark tale The Book Thief, which follows a young girl in Nazi Germany, is tonally off from the first scene. The glossy cinematography and excessively sentimental score jar with its grim subject matter and the performances verge on caricature. It doesn't help that all of the English dialogue is spoken with a German accent.

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The Great Gatsby (2013)

No adaptation of The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous work, has managed to capture the excess, glamour and underlying sleaze of the roaring Twenties. Baz Luhrmann's 2013 version was fun and arguably the best at revealing the insecurities of (a brilliant) Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby. However, the flashiness of the production stripped away all of Fitzgerald’s delicate story-telling.

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The Giver (2014)

Disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s fingerprints are all over this messy adaptation of Young Adult novel The Giver (2014), which attempts to fuse a sincere, thoughtful allegory with a Twilight-style love story backed up by action fresh from The Hunger Games and a Taylor Swift cameo. By attempting to appeal to every single teenager all at once, though, The Giver loses sight of its fascinating dystopian premise and gives its eccentric cast (among them Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes) very little to do.

The Weinstein Company

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Kill Your Friends (2015)

John Niven's Kill Your Friends is a blistering, debauched exploration into the life of a cocaine-sniffing record label agent. It passes by in the blink of an eye, which can't be said for its adaptation. The film, released in 2015, tries so hard to nail what Niven achieves so fluidly and it shows – the result is nothing short of embarrassing with the clean-cut Nicholas Hoult failing to convince as the sociopathic Steven Stelfox.

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The Girl on the Train (2016)

Although it will always exist in the shadow of Gillian Flynn’s ingenious thriller Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train is an undeniably pacy and intelligent novel. But it was completely let down by this US film adaptation. The 2016 release, starring Emily Blunt, is cheesy and lacking in nuance – and criminally takes the story away from its original gritty London setting, plonking the characters down in glossy New York for no apparent reason.

Universal Pictures

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Me Before You (2016)

The 2016 adaptation of Me Before You, starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, was brutally panned by critics for being emotionally manipulative. Its bad acting and problematic premise didn't help, either. Clarke's performance as the paid companion to Claflin’s quadriplegic was in particular criticised for being offensively exaggerated.

Warner Bros Pictures

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The Dark Tower (2017)

While not the same calibre of flop as Dreamcatcher, The Dark Tower is a fine example of a botched attempt at adapting one of Stephen King's finest works. With Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey in the lead roles as the heroic and villainous characters caught in a fated tussle, it should have soared – but a rush job such as Nikolaj Arcel's 2017 film is no way to treat such an expansive piece of work.

Sony Pictures Releasing

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On Chesil Beach (2017)

Despite magnetic performances from Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach was weighed down by a turgid script and clumsy old-age make-up. The finished product is worlds away from the McEwan adaptation that Ronan previously starred in – the Oscar-winning drama Atonement (2007).

Lionsgate

At first, he finds a home with the impeccably wealthy Barbours and their cold-eyed matriarch, Samantha (Kidman). He makes friends with Hobie (Wright), an antique dealer and the guardian of the young girl (Aimee Laurence) he connected with moments before the blast. Out of the blue, Theo’s absentee father (Luke Wilson) and equally shady girlfriend Xandra (Paulson) rock up, demanding he come live with them in the outskirts of Vegas, in a housing development that’s slowly being reclaimed by the desert.

The film eventually circles back to its opening scene, where an adult Theo contemplates suicide in an Amsterdam hotel. But there’s no mystery to how the film reaches that point, since it actually turns out to be part of a bizarre epilogue that veers into pure thriller territory. The Goldfinch holds you captive while it fumbles around, desperately trying to make you believe in it. It fades in and out between past and present, with images blurring into each other (thanks to Deakins they are, at least, beautiful images). The effect is supposed to be that of some horrid dream, but the result feels more like a drunken haze.

Peter Straughan’s screenplay is simply too timid to take a pair of shears to Tartt’s original work. More crucially, it seems unable to excavate the real heart of the story. The hope is that a series of pretty symbols will do the trick instead and it’ll all somehow come together. We repeatedly see The Goldfinch lying unblemished in the art museum rubble. The air is thick with dust and there’s a disquieting stillness. As Theo walks through the aftermath of the explosion, it’s depicted like a Greek hero’s journey through the Underworld, as ghosts call out to him with prophetic messages.

But it’s all poeticism without a sense of humanity, since the characters themselves aren’t written as people, but as broad statements. Kidman’s Samantha can only express emotion through significant glances, while her son’s entire character is an angry jock caricature: he sits down for breakfast, screams “who do I have to blow to get a cup of coffee around this place?”, and then bangs his fists on the table. Then there’s Wolfhard’s Boris, a Russian-accented latchkey kid who’s styled in post-punk cosplay and can’t be onscreen for more than five minutes without offering someone vodka. The Goldfinch is handsomely staged and filled with all the extravagant tragedy we’d expect from a film about rich, sad New Yorkers, but it’s far too wrapped up in the search for its own meaning. And that’s a pretty tiresome thing to watch.

The Goldfinch is released in UK cinemas on 27 September

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