The Goldfinch

A museum piece

The Goldfinch is a mildly entertaining middlebrow story with aspirations of refinement. It takes place in museums, antique stores, and the houses of rich people except for a spell in foreclosure hell in Texas. I did not read the novel by Donna Tartt, a writer I find overrated. I read The Secret History, which could be a good middlebrow movie.

The story is borderline preposterous: A young boy survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum where his mother is killed. He is reluctantly adopted by the wealthy family of one of his classmates. This kid somehow absconds from the explosion with a famous painting under his arm and this is the story of his fate and that of the painting.

Why would the kid keep the painting and not return it to the museum? The movie doesn’t explain.

John Crowley, who did such a beautiful job with Brooklyn, another literary adaptation, flounders here, not because of incompetence but because the story requires more messiness, less reverence, more emotional depth, and better casting. The protagonist, Theo, is played by two aggressively uninteresting actors. Oakes Fegley plays him in his 13 year-old iteration and Ansel Elgort as a young man. Neither makes any kind of impression. We’re supposed to empathize with this wretched orphan, yet we can’t because the actors are nullities and the directorial approach is…