Instead, it feels like a movie where way too many things happen, and we don't know anything about the people who make them happen.

It's supposed to be a picaresque adventure, in which Theo is shaped by his colorful guardians while protecting the secret painting that forms his only link to his mother and to happier times. 'The Goldfinch' film is all plot, with no room for the wit and eccentricities of character that are the deepest pleasures in the book. They've managed to cram into the movie almost everything that happened in the book, minus its feel-good coda, but 'crammed' is the operative word. What comes before it, though? Not so satisfying. The events that begin the book aren't shown until the end of the movie, which allows Straughan and director John Crowley ('Brooklyn') to craft a satisfying conclusion. He ends up doing time with a swank Manhattan family, a kind antiques dealer who helps him meet a bewitching girl named Pippa, his corrupt father in Las Vegas and vicious mobsters in Amsterdam.īoth the novel and movie are memory tales, with the adult Theo trying to make sense of the events of his life, but novels don't work the same as movies and screenwriter Peter Straughan wisely reconceived 'The Goldfinch,' jumbling together the elements in a nonchronological stew that matches Theo's bewilderment. Then, his mother dies in an art museum explosion, during which a confused Theo swipes the masterwork that gives the story its title.

'Goldfinch' is all but divided into TV episodes, as Theo (played at first by Oakes Fegley and then by Ansel Elgort) begins in his happy, middle-class life.

Bracegirdle) in that it features a blank hero whose life is shaped by being plopped into a series of extreme living situations where he learns from the wild characters with whom he must interact.Ĭould Tartt have said, 'Dear Hollywood: This book should be a prestige-TV miniseries' any louder? The novel is like Charles Dickens' 'David Copperfield' (there's even a character with a Dickensy name, Mr. The first mistake in making a movie of 'The Goldfinch' was making a movie of 'The Goldfinch.'ĭonna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster is nearly 800 pages long, divided into discrete sections that explore periods in the life of Theo Decker, whom we meet as a tween and follow into young adulthood.

The goldfinch synopsis