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The Goldfinch

After a short hiatus, here's the 7th film in the lockdown streaming series. The Goldfinch is showing on Netflix and Amazon Prime in Australia. It's a somewhat laboured adaptation of the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Donna Tarrt and it's directed by John Crowley.

The story follows Theo Decker, played young by Oakes Fegley and slightly older by Ansel Elgort (and yep, these are some wired names but have a crack at Wolfhard and Kleintank!). A rando-bomb explodes in a museum, killing his mum and so he half-inches a famous painting, the titular Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius, who also died in an explosion (which the painting may also have been in). The coincidences don't stop there but I'll leave you to them. This is all about grief and blame and possibly the role of facsimiles or substitutes in life and art. Theo eventually becomes an antique dealer under the mentor-ship of Jeffrey Wright's Hobie, whom he met after another brush with fate.

I found the performances pretty insipid, specifically Elgort in the lead, but Nicole Kidman and Wright can do better. Maybe it was required of them but it didn't quite roll for me. Technically, it has a few aces up its sleeve - Roger Deakins is DOP and he can make dirt look beautiful, Peter Straughan (of Tinker Tailor and Frank fame) adapted the book, and the soundtrack is especially solid, with songs from Radiohead, Them and New Order.

Ultimately though, I couldn't really go with it. It's uneven, though some of the sequences are well-paced, it overstays its welcome, and the last half hour or so seems to breach into another genre. Well-meaning but not quite up to snuff.

See also:

Crowley's first feature, Intermission (2003), a multi-character comedy/drama set in Dublin and the underrated, Frank (2014), directed by Lenny Abrahamson and penned by Straughan and Jon Ronson.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN POD....

Listen to "The Goldfinch" on Spreaker.

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