The Goldfinch is a fake imitation of a prestigious drama

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From time to time, a film delivers to its audience a kind of codified admission of guilt – perfect self-criticism, even accidental – on a silver platter. In The goldfinch, this moment comes early, behind the scenes of a vintage furniture store in Greenwich Village. Here, a merchant with sad-eyed antiques, Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), explains the difference between two chairs, identical to an untrained eye. One is authentic, he notes – an original hand-planed. The other is a reproduction, machined. And it is only when approaching and really looking at them, passing their hand over their surfaces, that you will be able to tell the difference. This turns out to be a very good metaphor for The goldfinch, a proudly "prestigious" literary drama that looks beautiful, presentable and important at a distance, but whose fraud becomes clear pretty quickly, once you're in front of it for two and a half hours. It is an empty approximation of art, all shiny surfaces hiding a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there is no basic utility to this imitation.

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Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Kidman, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Ashleigh Cummings, Aimee Laurence, Willa Fitzgerald

Availability

Theaters everywhere on September 13th

Director John Crowley, who made the sensitive and the transport Brooklyn (a better film by jumps, limits and just about any metric imaginable), is not limited to replicating a general craft design – the agreed-upon, but not the feel, of a great American film. He is working on a specific model: a 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner by author Donna Tartt. Her Goldfinch It's one of those novels that everyone seems to be reasonably insisting that it's impossible to adapt, with almost 800 pages of stories covering decades and continents, covering everything from terrorism to Dutch painting. Golden Age at Glenn Gould. Like many bestselling and acclaimed bestsellers, the book was less celebrated for its plots than for its detours and prose, for its stories and not for its history. But on the screen, The goldfinch offering only the ins and outs, falling into this common fit trap of goal-free fidelity; even if you do not read Tartt's book, you may feel an absence. This is one of those madnesses of page to screen that gives the persistent impression, scene by scene, of a wealth of Something to be lost in the translation.

It is certain that anyone reading the book, which takes place in the first person, could find a clearer window on the mind of the main character, a sullen boy who becomes a gloomy man. He certainly has good reason to think about him: Theodore Decker (Oakes Fegley) lost his mother in a bomb attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – a random and insane tragedy that the great Theo (Ansel Elgort) has always internalized by his fault, he explains via a shooting device before suicide attempt. Peter Straughan's script takes up some of Tartt's inner reflections, using them as a voiceover that emphasizes themes and psychology, as a high school student marking his gaping copy of the class with a highlighter. Yet, at least we get some meaning of what is happening at the top. As Fegley plays it, with a mannered introversion, Theo is an early emptiness of the personality, defined solely by his trauma and grief. Elgort does not fill the blanks, but it may be a continuity of character; he is an empty ball at any age.

After the accident, Theo ends up staying at a friend's house with her mother, Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman, covered with a cursed makeup for old age), becoming like a fifth child in her posh Park Avenue home. He was then snatched from this relative sanctuary and fell into the clutches of his father (Luke Wilson), an unpleasant and ugly father, and the harpy girlfriend (Sarah Paulson) of the dead-hangman dad, who takes her to the desert desert. , presented as a new smoldering wasteland of American cinema. Straughan's script sets the timeline, moving from these formative experiences to 14 years later today, when Theo became a New York businessman emotionally constipated and protected from Wright's benevolent evaluator. Characters, such as someone who survived the blast (Aimee Laurence as a girl, Ashleigh Cummings as a woman), sneak between them, are introduced and reintroduced as needed. If our hero appears as a sulky figure, a glorified public at best, the support cast sometimes makes up for it. Finn Wolfhard, for example, constantly drinks Russian accent as a partner of Theo in the adolescent revolt; it's much better in this month's flashbacks other long adaptation of Warner Bros. from a long bestseller on childhood trauma.

All of this plays like a book report. The goldfinch transcribes his source material without finding meaning, original or new, in his endless plot rolling. The film does not even really communicate the meaning of the project's namesake: The oil painting of 1654 Carel Fabritius Theo recovers from the rubble of the museum and squirrels, retaining it as a souvenir, the only part from his mother who remains "alive." Most of the time, it just becomes a MacGuffin here, making it a frankly ridiculous mini-thriller involving European black market dealers, straight out of a bad movie of Action presented without perspective, the story by heart of the events throws a clear relief on the artifices and coincidences of Tartt.This is to say nothing of The goldfinchThe dialogue is sometimes painful, as when Theo's mother explains with concern that she likes a painting because it indicates how "things do not last", just seconds before an eruption of flames and smoke does not prove it.

Crowley, do not tie, confers on the whole a transversal trust, a polish of professionalism that requires any half-convincing falsification. But his choices can be tricky: the idle flashbacks on the bombing itself (you never know who planned the attack nor why) are quieter than extremely loud, but they're related Incredibly unattractive evocation of the ashen horror of 9/11 He primarily delegates the responsibility of selling the depth of the ersatz to his capable collaborators. That means we get a Trevor Gureckis score that sounds endless – a sweaty symphony trying to convince us of the importance of the film. The director of photography, Roger Deakins, has also demonstrated a worthy know-how, offering museum polish by the way, cleaning Crowley's decorations in warm square orange or blue tones. Manhattan, perfectly corrected to give an impression of pleasant height. But you do not need the eyes of an expert to know a fake when you see it.

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