The Goldfinch (film)


The Goldfinch is a 2019 American film drama directed by John Crowley, written by Peter Straughan, and adapted from the 2013 novel of the same name by Donna Tartt. The film stars Ansel Elgort as Theodore Decker, whose life changes after his mother dies in a terrorist bombing at a museum and a dying man convinces him to take a famous painting called The Goldfinch from the museum. Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, and Nicole Kidman appear in supporting roles.
Film rights to the novel were sold to Warner Bros. and RatPac Entertainment, with ICM Partners brokering the deal. Two years later, Crowley was hired to direct the film adaptation, and Elgort was selected to portray Theodore Decker. Most of the remaining cast joined from October 2017 to January 2018. Filming began in New York City in January 2018 and moved to Albuquerque in April 2018 for the rest of the production.
The Goldfinch premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and was theatrically released in the United States on September 13, 2019, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received generally negative reviews from critics and was a box-office bomb, with estimated losses for the studio as high as $50 million.

Plot

Thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker's mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the aftermath of the explosion, a dying man urges him to take a paintingThe Goldfinchand his engraved ring. Theo hides the painting at his apartment.
As Theo does not have relatives in the city and was abandoned by his father, he is placed with the family of his estranged friend Andy, the Barbours. Theo reconnects with Andy and becomes close to Mrs. Barbour, who encourages his interest in her antiques and art. Following the instructions of the dying man, Theo locates the antiques shop of Hobart & Blackwell. The shop is run by James "Hobie" Hobart, whose partner Welton "Welty" Blackwell gave the ring to Theo to return. Welty's niece, Pippa, was also at the museum and survived the bombing, albeit seriously injured. Hobie allows Theo to visit Pippa, and the two bond, before Pippa is sent to live with her aunt in Texas. Theo begins to visit Hobie regularly.
Theo settles into life with the Barbours and is invited to go on vacation with them as Andy hints that his parents are considering adopting him. Before they can leave, though, Theo's estranged alcoholic father, Larry, claiming to be newly sober, arrives with his girlfriend Xandra to reclaim Theo and relocate him to Las Vegas. One of the few items he takes with him is The Goldfinch.
Theo forms a deep friendship with Boris, a Ukrainian itinerant whose father is physically abusive. Boris, who has also lost his mother, introduces Theo to drugs and alcohol, which follow him into adulthood.
Larry, secretly deep in gambling debt, attempts to extort Theo's education fund, then, failing this, flees Las Vegas and is killed in a drunk driving accident. Fearing foster care, Theo runs away to New York, taking with him Xandra's dog, Popper. He begs Boris to come with him. Boris promises to join him, and they share a kiss. He never does. Theo goes to Hobie, who allows him to live with him.
Eight years after Theo returns to New York, he runs into Andy's older brother Platt. Platt informs Theo that his father was bipolar, and that he and Andy were killed in a boating accident during one of his episodes. Theo visits the now sickly Mrs. Barbour, and reconnects with her daughter Kitsey, who flirts with him.
Theo works by selling restored antiques from Hobie's shop. A disgruntled art dealer, Reeve, accuses Theo of selling him a fake, which Theo offers to buy back. However, Reeve refuses, revealing that he believes Theo possesses The Goldfinch and is using it as collateral to finance his shop. Theo is shocked that Reeve has made the connection between him and the painting, but is relieved that his guess as to its whereabouts is wrong, as Theo continues to keep the wrapped painting in a storage locker.
Theo becomes engaged to Andy's younger sister Kitsey, though he still harbors a secret love for Pippa, who now lives in London. Theo catches Kitsey cheating on him, but decides to remain engaged due to his love for Mrs. Barbour and Kitsey's permissive attitude toward his drug habit. He takes the visiting Pippa to a film, and afterwards reveals his feelings towards her. Pippa, citing the instability caused by their shared childhood trauma, tearfully rejects him.
Distraught, Theo goes into a bar to score pills, where he runs into Boris. The two reconnect, and Boris tells Theo that he owes everything to their friendship. He apologizes to Theo for stealing The Goldfinch years ago, after Theo showed it to him during a drug blackout; Boris has used it to finance his life of crime before it was stolen by thieves. Theo is shocked; he thought he still had the painting, but finds Boris replaced it with a book wrapped in newspaper.
After a visit by Reeve, a heartbroken Hobie confronts Theo about his extensive sales of forged antiques, and the theft of The Goldfinch.
At Theo's and Kitsey's engagement party, Boris arrives and tells Theo he has a plan to recover The Goldfinch. Theo accompanies Boris to Amsterdam, where they execute a successful plan to recover the painting, but are soon chased down by a pair of hitmen. Boris is shot, Theo kills one of the men in self-defense, and the painting is stolen again. Theo goes to his hotel room and tries to commit suicide, only to be rescued by Boris. Boris tells Theo that he had a friend call in a tip to the police to recover the painting. After organizing a raid, the police are able to safely recover the painting, along with other lost and stolen art, including a Rembrandt. Boris argues that perhaps their strange path was all for the greater good: The Goldfinch survives, and other lost works were recovered. Theo returns home to begin repairing his damaged relationships.

Cast

In July 2014, film rights to the novel were sold to Warner Bros. Pictures and RatPac Entertainment with ICM Partners brokering the deal. Two years later, John Crowley was hired to direct the film adaptation. In August 2017, Warner Bros. finalized a deal with Amazon Studios to co-finance the adaptation, where Amazon would invest in more than a third of the project's budget and obtain streaming rights to the picture on its Prime service, while Warner Bros. would distribute the film in theaters worldwide.
On October 4, 2017, after a two-month casting search, Ansel Elgort was cast in the lead role of Theodore "Theo" Decker, following his breakout turn in Baby Driver. On the same day, cinematographer Roger Deakins revealed to Variety that The Goldfinch was his next project after Blade Runner 2049. Later that month, in light of his recent performance in Dunkirk, Aneurin Barnard was cast as Boris. On November 15, Sarah Paulson was cast as Xandra. By late November, Trevor Gureckis was hired as the film's composer. In December 2017, Willa Fitzgerald and Ashleigh Cummings joined the cast. During the same month, Kelley Dixon from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul was enlisted to be the film's editor. In January 2018, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Finn Wolfhard, and Luke Kleintank joined the cast. Later that month, the rest of the cast was announced as principal production commenced.
Principal photography began in New York on January 23, 2018, before moving to Albuquerque on April 3, 2018 for the rest of production.

Marketing

Footage from the film was first shown at CinemaCon on April 2, 2019. The first official images were released on May 28, 2019, as well as the first official teaser poster of the film. The first official trailer was released on May 29, 2019. About six months prior to its release, following test screenings, Warner Bros. knew the film would possibly perform poorly and in turn "dramatically" trimmed their prospective marketing plan.

Release

The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2019. It was theatrically released in the United States on September 13, 2019, after previously being set for October 11.

Reception

Box office

The Goldfinch grossed $5.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $4.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $9.4 million, against a production budget of around $45 million.
In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside Hustlers and was originally projected to gross $5–8 million from 2,542 theaters in its opening weekend. However, after making just $870,000 on its first day, estimates were lowered to below $3 million. It went on to debut to just $2.6 million, the sixth-worst saturated opening of all-time for a film playing on over 2,500 screens. Following its poor opening, many publications had already labeled the film a box-office bomb and estimated it would lose as much as $50 million. The film plunged 71% in its second weekend to $770,000.

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 24% based on 206 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Beautifully filmed yet mostly inert, The Goldfinch mishandles its source material, flattening a complex narrative into a largely uninvolving disappointment." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 40 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.
A.O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, said the film "looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It's more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "a botch job for the ages" and said it "appears to be adapting the Cliff’s Notes version of the book instead of the book itself, producing an unplayable series of scene snippets".