From the director of Brooklyn, John Crowley, comes another picture about which I am of two very different minds. The Goldfinch is a strange hybrid film, one that is sensory and intoxicating, full of mystery and beauty, but one that is also over-sentimental, flat and often inert, and cruelly boring.
After his mother is killed in a bombing at the Met, teenager Theo (the fabulous Oakes Fegley, the best young actor working this decade) is sent to live with the family of a school friend. Despite some initial chilliness, Theo's foster family warms up to him, or at least the mother does (an awesome Nicole Kidman), and they work through his grief together. Then his alcoholic estranged father (Luke Wilson) comes to take him away to Las Vegas with his girlfriend (Sarah Paulson). By the time he comes of a certain age -- time seems rather fluid and artificial in this film -- he returns to New York and seeks out his foster family. He also reconnects with his mentor, antiques curator Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), under whom he apprentices.
It's a drawn-out, somewhat Dickensian tale of coming of age, the kindness (and cruelty) of strangers, the eccentric people we allow into our lives. In these ways, the film succeeds magnificently, with potent performances across the board. That is, except from Finn Wolfhard, whose character Boris, a Ukranian immigrant with an abusive father, is so overplayed I can hear Winona Ryder wishing she had received the role. Besides him, the cast drove me to laughter and tears more than once in an endearing -- if wacky and wonky -- ensemble drama. They're all fairly complex characters with specific and highly varied energies, which helps the film feel at once hyper-realistic and a little surreal.
Not having read the novel (yet), I can only imagine this film sticks terribly close to it. Or at least to episodes of it, since the novel is massive. I suspect this partly due to the episodic nature of the screenplay and partly because of its inertia. Every time I thought things would start to get spicy, the plot dished out more of the same. And perhaps that's part of the point: the story, which encompasses many years of character development, can't always be exciting. Rather, the lives we lead are often dull with a few moments of profundity, strangeness and charm, that flavor our identity and experiences. This movie dwells in the moments just before or after these moments, moments where we have to just sit and take it all in, moments where we have to decide what to do with the bizarre crap going on around us.
But this is no surrealist comedy, and while I don't think it should have been, it could have been less elegiac and more blithesome, or at least kinetic. Whenever Nicole Kidman, goddess, wasn't on screen, I felt myself sliding irreparably into a stupor.
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