If you’ve read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I am happy to report there’s zero need for you to sit through the remarkably tedious two-and-a-half-hour movie adaptation. If you haven’t read The Goldfinch, I am happy to report there’s zero need for you to sit through the remarkably tedious two-and-a-half-hour movie adaptation.
This brain-numbingly bland cinematic version of Tartt’s nearly 800-page Pulitzer-winning novel functions as a thesis statement on the wrongheadedness of turning novels into films without dismantling the story from its very foundation and rebuilding from scratch. (See also: Where’d You Go, Bernadette.) What worked relatively well in Tartt’s prose—the interiority, the wistfulness, and the numbed but palpable grief of the main character, Theo—is turned limp and lugubrious by director John Crowley’s literal staging of the book’s somewhat preposterous plotting.