The Goldfinch (2019)

Rating: ⭐⭐

I approached this movie with very little knowledge of what its story is about as I hoping to be pleasantly surprised by it since it has the looks of something potentially epic. Its poster also did little to provide any clue as to what the movie is about. I guess if you are an ardent reader, you would know that this is based on a very popular novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for its American author Donna Tartt in 2014. Since I have not read the novel I am unable to judge or compare the novel and the movie and have to judge the movie on its own.

With a running time of close to two and a half hours the movie has got to be bloody engrossing in order not to lose its audience midway. Unfortunately, the movie's lengthy runtime was pretty much felt. It starts off well with an interesting premise of a young boy traumatised by being in a terrorist bombing in an art museum which killed his mother. But the story gets a bit improbable as we learn the boy was coaxed into stealing a priceless piece of art, The Goldfinch! It then takes us through the boy's life as he harbours this secret and guilt over the years until something happens at the end that was some sort of redemption. The middle portion of how the young boy spends his years with his father and second wife, and how he makes friends with a boy from Ukraine who introduces him to booze and drugs is painfully slow and sometimes directionless. Despite taking a its own sweet time to cover the young boy's time, the ending involving gangsters, in Amsterdam, seemed rushed in comparison and frankly rather far-fetched. It ended up feeling like something created to provide a kind of meaningful closure to the whole lengthy story. This is certainly not in the same league of Citizen Kane with its Rosebud reference.

Director John Crowley has not done justice to the story and like in Little Women (although thankfully in less frequency), injected multiple time jumps to the story without providing any added value to the story telling. In fact as with Little Women, this jumping around with the timelines was more annoying than enlightening. Most of the performances were acceptable with probably Oakes Fegley standing out as the main character when he was young. Nicole Kidman had a supporting role but behaved in a restrained constipated manner that is never quite understood. Ansel Elgort played the boy as a grown up but with little impact especially when his younger self was far more interestingly portrayed by Oakes. I can't say I would recommend this movie because it demands two and half hours of your time only to provide an unsatisfying feeling. All I can say is approach with caution.