‘The Goldfinch’ Review: Beloved Novel Becomes Leaden and Lifeless Movie That Never Gets Off the Ground

The big problem with “The Goldfinch” — — is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.

That critical error isn’t an overestimation of Donna Tartt’s blockbuster novel of the same name, so much as it is a categorical mischaracterization.

Perhaps even an unavoidable one.The book, a vivid but ridiculous neo-Dickensian epic that borrows its title from the 17th-century Carel Fabritius painting at its core, is an improbable bildungsroman about the immortality of beautiful objects.

Tartt’s novel became controversial among critics in the same way that anything so popular and acclaimed invariably does, but the story’s proximity to the great masterpieces of Western culture left fans convinced that it belonged among them, and inspired detractors to read it for filth.In truth, “The Goldfinch” probably falls somewhere in between, but the Hollywood adaptation — a gauzy, bloated slab of Oscar bait — was always going to have to pick sides.

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