The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch is adapted from Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel.

As a thirteen-year-old boy, Theo (Oakes Fegley) and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces. There, while he is busy ogling a pretty red-headed girl, a bomb explodes killing his mother and several others while injuring the red-headed girl.

In the rubble Theo encounters the uncle of the girl who gives him a ring before dying. Theo then takes a painting, Carel Fabritius' The Goldfinch, which has miraculously survived the blast as he escapes. He then carries the painting with him throughout his life.

With his father absent, Theo moves in with a school friend, Andy Barbour (Ryan Foust), and his wealthy family where he grows close to the mother Samantha (Nicole Kidman). Meanwhile the ring leads him to the antiques business of James ‘Hobie’ Hobart (Jeffrey Wright), the partner of the man who died in the museum, and reunites him with the red-headed girl, Pippa (Aimee Laurence), who is convalescing with him. Theo will carry his unrequited love for Pippa throughout his life.

Out of the blue Theo’s father Larry (Luke Wilson) shows up with his girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson) they uproot Theo to take him to live with them on the outskirts of Las Vegas, in a housing development that’s seems to be slowly disappearing into the Nevada desert. It is here that he meets a Ukrainian wild child called Boris (Finn Wolfhard), who calls him Potter (as in Harry) and who seems to have a bottle of vodka permanently glued to his hand. The two boys spend their days drinking alcohol and taking drugs.

When Theo's father gets drunk and dies in a car crash, he decides to return to New York but Boris won’t come with him. He is taken in by Hobie who teaches him the antiques trade and eventually Theo (now played by Ansel Elgort) becomes a partner in the business but gets in trouble for selling fake antiques. One such punter accuses him of stealing the Goldfinch and using it in a drugs deal. Which isn’t possible as Theo has the painting in his possession but hadn’t looked at it in years...

Then he runs into Boris (now Aneurin Barnard) again, now largely a gangster, and he reveals that he borrowed The Goldfinch from Theo when they were in Nevada and has since used it as collateral in some deals.

He also runs into the Barbours again (it’s a small world), bumping into Andy’s brother Platt (Luke Kleintank), who is now not quite the ******** he was back in the day and who breaks the sad news that Andy is no longer alive. Theo becomes engaged to the daughter Kitsey (Willa Fitzgerald) although Kitsey already has a long time boyfriend she intends to keep seeing but Theo is a better ‘face’ for the family. While Theo, of course, is still obsessed with Pippa (now Ashleigh Cummings), who has moved to London with her boyfriend to escape him or rather escape ‘their history’. FFS embrace it girl.

When Boris appears at Theo's engagement party (to the girl he doesn’t love who doesn’t love him and who isn’t Pippa anyway) with a plan to retrieve The Goldfinch they both jump on a plane to Amsterdam where Boris’s heavies attempt to steal the painting back. The plan goes awry and in the resulting melee, Theo kills one of the men that attacks them and an injured Boris disappears again leaving Theo alone in his hotel room contemplating suicide. 

Deep breath.

Yes it’s a complex film and one that seemed to trip over its own feet at almost every opportunity but I liked it. I liked the complexity of it all even if it didn’t make sense at times. It also seemed to runs out of steam resulting in an ending where Boris basically turns up to say ‘all sorted now’ leaving Theo embarking on a lengthy reflection that he only took the painting as a memento of his mother while the audience are muttering ‘what the hell happened there’.

Apparently the book is complex too and audiences these days are rarely trusted to work out things for themselves, so we should be grateful here for being given the chance in what is a good film but not an outstanding one.

The Fault In Our Stars

I’ve seen the ‘Fault in Our Stars’ coming over the horizon for quite a while, so when my partner says ‘what are the chances of you taking me to see this?’ I’m ready for it. How bad can it be?

Quite bad. Based on a best selling book by John Greene, our ‘heroine’ is Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodly), a teenager with terminal thyroid cancer and part-time grenade. Her lungs no longer work and so she carries an oxygen tank around with her in a handy backpack.

She’s also your typical surly teenage grenade, so she has to be coerced into attending a cancer support group. You do feel for her though when the group leader, a testicular cancer survivor, turns out to be religious nut that rolls out a large rug of Jesus at the start of ever session.

At this group she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a fellow teenager who has lost the lower part of his leg to cancer. Augustus, or should I say Gus, is with his friend Isaac who has eye cancer. Everyone knows that Isaac’s attractive big-chested girlfriend is going to dump him the minute he goes blind but he doesn’t see it coming. Notwithstanding that, Isaac is by far the best character in the film and is seriously underused.

Hazel and Gus immediately fall in love, they don’t know it obviously but we do. Now in true romantic fiction style, we just have to wait a couple of hours for them to get it together. Yes, it’s the same old format where boy gets girl, eventually.

Gus is seriously odd. He carries around a pack of cigarettes and occasionally puts one in his mouth saying ‘they don't kill you unless you light them’. It's a metaphor apparently as well as being ridiculous. Surely most girls would have dumped him on the spot.

She lends him her favourite book, he lends her his. We never find out what she thought of his but we do launch off into a rather random sub-plot where they track down the author of her book, which takes them all the way to Amsterdam where the author breaks his reclusiveness just for them. This then allows for an even more random visit to Anne Frank’s house where their first kiss is applauded by the general public. Not that anyone would have dared clap or kiss in such a sombre place.

This spurs them on to spend one night of passion together, although of course if they both hadn’t prevaricated and lived life for the minute they could have been at it for months. The message of the film seems to be to value every minute but these two don’t.

Back in America, it is revealed that Gus’s cancer has returned, his number is up and he asks Hazel to write a eulogy for him. Which is sort of sweet.

When Gus dies he could have been hit by bus, choked on his beef burger or even killed by aliens rather than dying of cancer. Any of these would have only required a minor script rewrite. Sadly this is a film about romance with a side portion of cancer as opposed to what it could have been, a film about cancer with a bit of romance.

Hazel goes on about ‘pain deserves to be felt’ but I think she means the pain of a teenage romance not the pain of cancer because the film never gets into what it’s like to live with cancer and they both look so damn well throughout.

So it’s hard to buy into the constant sniffling in the cinema which I at first put down to the high pollen count today but clearly it moved some people. As you can perhaps tell, this film clearly wasn’t made with me in mind.  

I do occasionally shed a tear at films, well I did at Marley and Me, but this film was seriously lacking in dog.

Of course Hazel could have saved the whole film if she’d quoted Ade Edmondson in her eulogy. Poor Gus, now he's died for real. Without me. Selfish bastard.