A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I need to come clean. I purposely did not read this book once I heard a movie was in progress hoping to enjoy the movie first as the book is always better. The plan was to read the book after seeing the movie to enjoy both versions. Now, I’m not so sure I took the right tactic as I know the big secrets and harbor almost no desire to read the book based on the film.
The plot and the characters verge upon enough to carry the arcane film rendition of a promising book written by Donna Tartt. A Pulitzer prize no less! Just enough rememberable faces to draw in a crowd without taking away from the obscurity of the plot. Even the artwork in the names evokes a certain sense of wonder in its beauty and mystique. Unfortunately, the filmmaking focuses on the wrong art to create the story.
Like two trains in the night, we follow 13-year-old Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley and Ansel Elgort) and his 20-something self as the story finds a meeting point before crashing. The two sides of the story take two-and-a-half hours to bait and switch the audience and poor Theo. We will get back to the issues of length in a minute. First, let’s start with Theo.
At an art museum in New York, young Theo and his mother enjoy the paintings until his eye wanders to a lovely redhead (Ashleigh Cummings). Then the building blows up in a bomb attack. We never fully learn why the bombing took place. We do know Theo’s mother dies as does the redhead Pippa’s guardian and that Theo took the painting of the Goldfinch painting.
Theo turns to a friend’s family for a home. Nicole Kidman portrays Mrs. Barbour, a woman drowning in wealth and illusion. Though he spends little time with the family as they care for their own for children while deciding what to do with the orphan. Meanwhile, Theo seeks the lovely redhead Pippa at her home in an antique store with her caretaker Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), the curator of an antique store.
Eventually, Theo’s dad, Larry (Luke Wilson) drags Theo from the Barbour Family’s home and the only city he has ever known, far away to the Nevada desert. Theo’s father and new stepmom Xandra (Sarah Paulson) teach the young teen the harsher side of life as they use him for money and ignore his use of drugs and alcohol to cope with this shattered life. A humorous Ukrainian friend Boris (Finn Wolfhard), comes along to help him spiral out of control, another teenager with a dead mother and abusive father the world left to his own defenses.
When his father leaves Theo to his own defenses, he runs back to Hobie and the antique store for a haven and home. Despite his desire for Boris to join him back in New York, Theo finds himself alone pining for Pippa and growing into an antique dealer. As a man, he works alongside Hobie to sell restored furniture until he makes a bad deal and finds himself in a world of hurt. Someone knows he took the priceless painting.
Time brings the Barbour family back to his door and Theo uses the opportunity to seek a place in the family portrait by marrying Mrs. Barbour’s daughter Kitsey (Willa Fitzgerald). The name alone should give an indication of the aristocratic blood and money backing the family broken by death and pain maintained. Theo’s heart still belongs to Pippa, the girl he saw those many years ago for the first time on the most pivotal day of his dour life.
When another familiar face returns to the scene, Theo finds his days spiraling out of his control as he crashes through bad decisions and the haunting memory of his mother. On the brink of suicide, someone needs to rescue Theo from his survivor’s guilt and find a way to move onto a future.
I promised to come back to the excruciatingly length of the film and I have. The extra forty-five minutes dedicate to creating a film as artsy as the painting and the main character. Donna Tartt’s book succeeded where the film flopped, making the out-of-focus moments come together in a compelling and legible manner. Further, Nicole Kidman’s wooden performance carries on the muddled discharge of the book. Luke Wilson made a memorable performance but his onscreen life was too short to make his plot worthy of adding so much time to the script.
The whole movie offers several promising angles before taking the wrong corners. A chance at a few love stories, a few life-long friendships, all elements the book probably juggled with ease failed to make a grand entrance in the film. Instead, we sit through surreal out-of-focus pauses meant to elicit evocative emotions. Yes, a movie needs to be pretty, I can live with pretty but trying to turn the story into an art show over character development doesn’t work.
Starting at the beginning and working up to a climax we watch Theo drown in unwarranted guilt with sour-puss faces and streams of powdered drugs leading up to a suicide attempt. Mind you, with all the ways his life failed I understand his desire to take himself out of the picture. The road to his demise takes too many unnecessary stops without enough reward. It’s not the plot, which offers many potentially valuable side streets, but the lack of valuable life-changing moments to drive the climax home.
What I loved; the painting for one. A real work of art worthy of an intriguing back story. Boris is the saving grace here. He provides comic relief and an intriguing back story. This should have been the focus. Skip all the nonsensical fake romance and just stick to the element of the movie that worked as Theo and Boris were the only two with any chemistry on screen. Theo was better, albeit drugged, around his buddy. He found an outlet for his grief and adventure too. They were enough of an unrequited love story on their own, although unromantic, if the story had clung to this thread instead of unraveling other themes the movie could have dropped some length in sacrifice for a more compelling story.
Now available on Digital and on Blu-ray™ & DVD December 3rd
