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The hefty Pulitzer-winning novel divided critics for being too long and too detailed – yet it is more cinematic than The Secret History
If it is surprising that none of Donna Tartt’s three novels has made it to the screen before now, it’s perhaps more surprising that The Goldfinch will be the first. Warner Brothers bought the rights to her first, bestselling, novel, The Secret History, in 1992, the year of its publication. With its cast of beautiful young obsessives drawn to murderous violence it begged to be filmed. Yet it never happened; Alan Pakula, who was to have directed it, died in 1998. Later, Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother acquired the rights, but also failed to make the movie. (The rights have duly reverted to the novelist herself.)
Now, however, Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch (2013), has been made into a film. Directed by John Crowley, who was responsible for the adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s dauntingly inward novel Brooklyn, it stars Oakes Fegley and Ansel Elgort as Tartt’s protagonist and narrator, Theo Decker, at different stages of his life. (One big challenge to the film-maker is the eight-year jump halfway through the novel, which takes Theo from his early teens to his 20s.) Aged 13, the only child of a single mother, Theo is cast adrift when she is killed in a bomb explosion at a New York art gallery. He survives, and in the chaos purloins a painting that his mother loved and with which he becomes obsessed. Nicole Kidman features as Mrs Barbour, the mother of his schoolfriend Andy, who initially appears to adopt Theo. Luke Wilson plays his feckless, self-deluding father, who reappears to take him off to a strange new life in Las Vegas. Continue reading...