The Goldfinch shows the perils of being too faithful to the book The Goldfinch might have a Pulitzer, but plenty of people have been saying for years it’s a bad book And the movie fails because it only exacerbates the flaws that were already there in the source material. Pulitzer Prize or no, The Goldfinch is a fundamentally and massively flawed book. And by about halfway through the novel, that spell is broken, more or less for good. Once the spell of Tartt’s storytelling subsides, there is nothing left to care about: not the characters, not the plot, not the self-consciously Dickensian coincidences that push the whole thing forward. (Is anything in the world more boring than reading about someone else’s drug habits?) I couldn’t hold on to anything from those long indulgent reading sprees except for a trite epigram about how good things can come from bad actions and a long description of someone’s extremely boring drug trip. When I tried rereading the book recently, it never felt like a chore to pull out the big heavy hardcover and slip beneath the stream of the plot after only a few pages, I started to crave it like coffee.īut then I would shut the book again, and instead of a pleasurable caffeine buzz, I would only feel let down and disappointed and a little as though the book had manipulated me by trying to get me to buy into cheap sentiment. It has the kind of storytelling that you can get lost in - just like you can get lost in the immense and palpable aesthetic pleasure the book takes in objects, in signifiers of tony expensive taste paired with a virtuous middle-class budget. For much of its lengthy sprawl, The Goldfinch has an immersive, read-it-under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight vitality. That’s not to say this book fails entirely. It’s a hollow, thematically empty book filled with hollow, psychologically empty characters, and it suffocates under the sheer weight of its 771 pages. In fact, the reason The Goldfinch doesn’t work on the screen is that it doesn’t really work on the page either. The problem is not just that The Goldfinch doesn’t work on the screen. At Vox, film critic Alissa Wilkinson concluded that the story simply “doesn’t work on screen.” And critics were no kinder than the box office currently, The Goldfinch has a rating of 27 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The Goldfinch made just $2.6 million in its opening weekend, the sixth-worst opening of all time for a movie opening on more than 2,500 different screens, which is an especially disastrous beginning given that it cost $45 million to make.
Two weeks ago, The Goldfinch - the new movie based on Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel - arrived in theaters and immediately, catastrophically, flopped.
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