When a man named Patrick Vialaneix stole a Rembrandt he was obsessed with, he said that he was the painting’s “guardian but also its hostage.” For Theo, holding onto the painting is an act of self-preservation, but he also holds himself emotionally hostage. It’s Theo’s reluctance to let go of the one event that pains him most. But the painting mostly serves as a representation of the aftershock of trauma. One criticism I’ve seen is that the film ignores the significance of the painting because it’s rarely shown, and when it is, it’s hidden beneath layers of newspaper, clumsily wrapped by Theo. And in the subsequent years when he’s forcibly moved from New York to Las Vegas and back again, the only object of permanence is the painting-and even that gets taken away from him. Just before his whole world is shattered, Theo’s mother points to her favorite painting in the museum: a small bird shackled to its perch. “When I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,” he says. Condensing Tartt’s novel into a two-hour movie presents its own challenges, but the unavoidable baggage only makes an insurmountable task even more onerous.Įverything revolves around the day Theo loses his mother.

At around 800 pages, Donna Tartt’s Dickensian opus about trauma, drug addiction and art theft is a behemoth to adapt, and it’s perhaps the most divisive Pulitzer Prize winner ever. To put it simply: The Goldfinch is a flop.īefore it even had a chance to spread its wings, The Goldfinch faced an uphill struggle. The Goldfinch is not only a critical failure, it’s a financial failure too-earning just $2.6 million on opening weekend, it’s now the sixth worst opening of all time for a film playing on more than 2,500 screens. Indiewire’s scathing review said it’s a “gauzy, bloated slab of Oscar bait,” while Little White Lies called it “cinema as taxidermy.” And then it got worse.Ĭonvincing any cinemagoer to part with their $15 for a dour drama can be a hard sell, even with all the gold star calibre behind it. The film adaptation of Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel from Brooklyn director John Crowley was unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month and was immediately met with a, let’s say, middling reception. It’s been a rough few weeks for The Goldfinch.

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