BEFORE: Between my two jobs, my November calendar is really starting to fill up - I'm still fairly sure I can get the November films watched before Thanksgiving if I just keep chipping away at it. Who needs to sleep, anyhow? There's a family party this coming Saturday, so it's only Tuesday, and my weekend's booked up already. Jeez, remember last year when everything was closed, and the NY Marathon was scrubbed, Thanksgiving was a wash-out and almost nobody showed up for Black Friday? You'd think there was a pandemic or something - anyway, people are going to party twice as hard this year, just to make up for last year, I suspect. So, bring it on, I guess?
I just had one gig cancel next week, so there you go, I can sleep next Tuesday. Looking forward to it. Until then, on with the countdown, because the hits don't stop until we reach the top, or Movie #4,000, which is just 26 films away. Jeffrey Wright carries over from "Monster" - see, I told you we'd circle back around to him.
THE PLOT: A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a rush of panic, he steals "The Goldfinch", a painting that eventually draws him into a world of crime.
AFTER: In the before-times, back when I used to manage two animation studios instead of one, I had access to a giant library of Academy screeners from the past several years. This is how the major studios used to make sure that all the voters saw their film, they'd actually MAIL OUT a DVD (sometimes with a $10 bill inside and a little Post-it that read, "WHOOPS! How did THAT get in there?"), only that really wasn't a GREAT copy of the film, because every five minutes the movie would have "FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION" on the screen as a sub-title, just to remind you that this gift came with an implied promise of recompensation, that you then had to vote for this film, or at least THINK about voting for this film. I can tell you, having worked for TWO Academy members at the same time, that they can get drunk with power, and spoiled by having so many DVDs arrive in the mail between October and February - it's a bit like Netflix (old Netflix) that you don't have to pay for.
The Academy has since migrated from copying OLD Netflix to copying NEW Netflix, most eligible films are now available on the Academy's streaming site, since there haven't been official in-person Academy or guild screenings in a while, but slowly, ever so slowly, they're coming back. I've worked a few of them, like "Passing" and "The Harder They Fall" over the past two weeks, and if the NYC COVID statistics keep dropping, they may be back in full force in January. But before all this craziness, I had access to about 10 years of Academy screeners for a while, because my boss at the time saved ALL of them, even the ones she didn't watch. I'd managed to look through them all and subtly move all the ones I hadn't seen and WANTED to see over to one particular section of the studio. Hundreds of DVDs, and I took it upon myself to organize them into two piles - "SEEN IT or DON'T CARE" and "HAVE NOT SEEN, WOULD LIKE TO". By the time the pandemic hit, I'd borrowed enough of them to get that all-important second section down to just 30 or 40 films.
Since then, most of those films have turned up on cable, or on one streaming service or another, so I've managed to keep chipping away at that list, and after watching "Mudbound" this past week, it's down to just 12 - 11 after today's film. Some of these films are just plain impossible to link to - "Roma", "I Lost My Body" and "The Breadwinner", for example, others just haven't been top priority for me - like "The Farewell", "The Two Popes" and "Faces Places". I feel like maybe I will get to them if I can, but if I don't, it's because there are 300 or 400 other films I've determined to be more pressing. There's a whole new calendar year coming, though - and right now January's completely wide open, so we'll see what 2022 brings.
SPOILER ALERT for "The Goldfinch", if you don't want to know about the plot, please turn back now, because I think there's no way to talk about this without giving some stuff away.
Anyway, "The Goldfinch" wants so badly to position itself as a mystery, only it tells us the identity of the art thief right away - so, umm, how much of a mystery could it possibly be? This kid, Theo, was in the museum with his utterly perfect mother at the time of a terrorist attack, and after surviving the bombing (apparently a lot of people didn't), he naturally does what anybody would do in the aftermath of a tragedy, he steals a painting. Umm, OK? Me, I think I'd thank my lucky stars for being alive, maybe go buy a lottery ticket or something, but this kid steals a painting. Is this a thing, or did the author go out of her way to think, "Hmm, what's the most unlikely thing I can have this kid do at this exact point in time?" The kid steals a painting, just because his mother liked it so much, I get that, but ewww, it's been on the FLOOR after a bombing, and it's all covered in dirt and dust and who knows what else?
There's also a man who survived the bombing, at least for a while, though he's clearly out of his head and he encourages Theo to take the painting, for some reason. He also gives Theo his ring and tells him the name of the antique shop that he co-owns, and Theo's supposed to bring the ring to the shop, for some reason. Looking back on it, I think maybe this guy wanted Theo to steal the painting and bring it to the antique shop, because KA-CHING, only Theo totally screwed this up and kept the painting for himself? This is only one instance of a few maddening things about this film, where a lot of people do seemingly random things for seemingly no reasons. Again, it's like some author said, "You know what, motivations are boring. It's much more interesting if people just DID stuff and we'll sort out connections and motivations later." Umm, no, you'd better sort that shit out NOW or we're going to have problems.
The film then moves forward via a split-timeline format, one timeline follows young Theo and the other follows adult Theo, and we toggle between the two quite liberally. Sometimes the young Theo scene is a nightmare or flashback being had by adult Theo, but honestly, that feels like a big narrative cheat. As we move forward in our daily lives, we don't dream about what happened to us when we were 11 years old one night, and then the next night, we remember something that happened to us at age 12, that's not how memory works. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want this film to jump around Theo's teen years randomly, either, but this is equally not how memory or storytelling is supposed to work.
I will admit, however, that this MAY be the best way to slowly reveal a set of unstated secrets and yet-to-be revealed events, and their effects, because as each timeline slowly unfolds, we gradually learn more about the effects the past has had on the future. That's the way a lot of people tell stories now, it's become sort of textbook, but it's also getting very trite, very quickly. It just makes me long for the days where stories started at the beginning and ended at the end, if you know what I mean - but so many authors and filmmakers have pulled this trick again and again that it's become trendy, almost expected. You can pull on that thread only so many times before the whole sweater unravels, if you ask me.
The plan here was to cast actors as the young versions of key characters, and then cast other actors to play those same characters as adults, and ideally those actors should LOOK a bit like each other, only that never really truly works out. Sometimes all you need is two actresses with the same shade of red hair, and OK, I'm willing to go along for that ride. But does young Theo look like he's going to grow up and look like adult Theo? Umm, not really, no - they both wear glasses, but is that really enough? Are you saying all men with glasses look alike, because that's not the case. I found that when adult Theo walked into a room to interact with someone he hadn't seen in 10 years, he was immediately recognized, and I just doubt that would be the case. Look, he could confirm his identity in 10 seconds, all he has to say is "It's me, Theo", but then we'd somehow lose the wonderment that comes from the recognition of the other character - sorry, I'm just not buying it.
The worst offense here is probably the two distinct looks of the young Boris and the adult Boris, they look nothing alike. I heard that only your nose and ears keep growing larger after you become an adult, so how is adult Boris' nose SMALLER? Did he get a nose-job? Was he in an accident? Already I've thought about this much more than anyone working on this film did, so did this film have two casting directors that just didn't communicate with each other, or one who ended up shrugging his shoulders and saying, "You know what? It's good enough, nobody really cares about this..."
Next there's the problem of Theo as a protagonist - again, don't forget he was an art thief at a very young age, but there are so many other reasons I find it hard to root for him...sure, he SEEMS like a decent, innocent sort, but the camera sees all, tells all - when it wants to, anyway, and so when we learn that young Theo's been drinking, taking drugs, well, then maybe I'm liking him a little bit less, I don't know. What happened to that innocent kid I thought I knew? Oh, right, the explosion thing. Look, tragedies happen to everybody, but they don't turn everybody into bad people, that's not the way things work. We still have free will, even the people who lost family members during 9/11 or during the pandemic still had to soldier on, and I think many of them continued to be honest and upright folks. You can't just blame bad behavior on the inability to deal with the tragedies that come your way, you still have to take responsibility for your actions, right?
Adult Theo tries to get something going with Pippa, a girl who was also damaged by the explosion, and clearly she's got feelings for Theo somewhere, but she's already married to somebody in the U.K. by the time Theo makes his move. Sure, coincidence happens, and we can take advantage of those coincidences if we want, we can even tell us that some force bigger than we can understand - God, fate, karma - may have had a hand in pushing people together. But then there's an even bigger force at work - chaos, entropy, Satan or just plain old bad luck - and that can undo the good work of coincidence if we allow it to.
Besides, another relationship is always just around the corner, if one falls through, just find another (a.k.a. if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with) so Theo moves on to Kitsey Barbour, the daughter from the family that took him in after the tragedy. They're engaged, but Theo finds out before the wedding that she's been seeing another man - which is technically not cheating, because they're not married yet, except that it's totally cheating. UNLESS Theo forgot to have the conversation with her about being exclusive, which if he did, that's sort of on him. Anyway, I get the feeling that Theo might rather be with her mother (or was that just me?) or maybe even with Boris (again, just me?). Look, if that's the case, Theo, just drop Kitsey and go for it, I don't know with whom, just pick one.
Bottom line, this is an epic story that spans a decade and travels across the country and over to Europe, but ultimately feels like it didn't really go anywhere, and it's filled with characters I didn't really care about, played by actors who you THINK you might have seen before in something else, but for most of them, it turns out you haven't. (Except for the five or six bankable stars, they all just sort of look like that other actor you know from that show...). And who the heck was I supposed to root for here, I'm still not sure - and was this the best possible outcome, given the premise? That's very, very hard to tell, because they really muddied up those waters here.
The only mystery here seems to be, why did I spend two hours plus on watching this movie, an investment of my time that didn't really get me much in return. Did I miss something here, or was there not much here to get? Like Boris said, "Good things, bad things, does it even matter?" What the frick is the big deal about this painting, anyway, it's just a damn bird, who even cares? If it were the Mona Lisa or a Warhol or something I could maybe get behind this, but at the end of the day, it's just a stupid little painting about a bird. I'm begging, just give me one reason to care about it. Nothing? Yeah, didn't think so.
Also starring Ansel Elgort (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Oakes Fegley (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Prom"), Luke Wilson (last seen in "Scream 2"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "Blue Jay"), Willa Fitzgerald, Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Ashleigh Cummings, Aimee Laurence, Robert Joy (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Boyd Gaines (last seen in "Heartbreak Ridge"), Carly Connors, Luke Kleintank (last seen in "Midway" (2019)), Hailey Wist, Ryan Foust, Jack DiFalco, Austin Weyant, Collin Shea Schirmacher, Denis O'Hare (last seen in "Late Night"), Joey Slotnick (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Gordon Winarick, Nicky Torchia, James Donahower, Peter Jacobson (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), Caroline Day (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Kevin Owen McDonald, Matteo van der Grijn, Mark Kingsford, Bill Barberis, Milan Sekeris, Sandy Lopez, Misha Osherovich, Harry Smith, Angela Cove, Alton Fitzgerald White, Don Castro (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Robert Turano, Pamela Dunlap (last seen in "Nick of Time").
RATING: 4 out of 10 cabinet veneer samples
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