The Goldfinch is an 800 page Pulitzer Prize winning novel
that I read and posted on about five years ago. It is also a
book the reluctant wife has never read. I
was excited to see it at the theater, despite the fact that it had a very low rotten tomato rating
(24%). The reluctant wife and I both
loved it and we are concerned about this rating because the audience for this
film – people who care about good films – is going to be particularly responsive to
the critic’s perspective. For what it is
worth, we think this film – which is slow and complex and does – as some of the
critics point out - retain the failings of the book – worked for both the reader and the non-reader. And I argued, in that prior post, that the failings of the book are part of what makes it great art.
I have a notoriously poor memory, so when I was pitching
this movie to my wife for a weekend date and she asked about it, I had to go
back and read my old post to remind myself of it – especially because she was
concerned that – it being a film about trauma – it might be more violent
than she could tolerate. Reading my post,
I realized that I had written it to someone who had also read the book – and I
wrote it as someone who had read a long and confusing book that felt a bit like
a dream and a bit like being inside the mind of someone who is recovering from
a trauma (while additional traumas are occurring and they are feeling more and
more isolated), and their mind is becoming more and more disjointed, and my
mind became somewhat disjointed and dissociated as I did this and the post
therefore did as well.
The film – despite mirroring aspects of that process – in particular
telling the story in flashback and with additional interjections and partial
reconstructions of scenes that become more clear across time – puts
the plot front and center in a way the book does not – because the hero – Theo (the young version played
by Oakes Fegley, the
older version by Ansel
Elgort) – is an object to be viewed rather than a subject to be identified
with. So, from
this more objective perspective, it is clear that this film (and the book before it) is about
the guilt of Theo's surviving a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that him mother did
not. It is about the ways that the guilt
insinuates itself into Theo’s functioning, leaving him feeling that he cannot
act – and therefore allows him to act in ways that he is able to disown and
be distant from.
Theo is a flaccid hero – perhaps another reason the critics
don’t like him – they want, in the age of the Marvel Universe, heroes who are
intentional. The only intentional hero
in this film is Boris (the young Boris is played superbly by Finn Wolfhard and the
older Boris played equally well by Aneurin Barnard), and
he is complicated. Boris is an antihero,
at best, but this is a great role and I think a truly great character to come
out of the book. As little of the rest
of the book as I remembered – Boris loomed large – and the movie got him spot
on. The character reminds me of the
essence of one of my true friends – a deeply troubled and deeply human person
who, despite his hatred of all mankind, was one of the most loving and true
people I have ever known.
Boris is a character that plops into Theo’s life after he is
torn from the creepy but sheltering care of a family headed by Samantha Barber
(Nicole Kidman) in
the aftermath of the bombing. Theo’s
alcoholic father (Luke
Wilson), a small time gambling hustler always in debt to his bookie, shows
up to claim Theo and take him to an empty development outside of Las Vegas, where
Boris, a Ukrainian living with his abusive father, helps Theo make a little bit of sense out of his senseless life and helps
dull his pain by teaching him to snort Vicodin, drink Vodka, and drop acid,
including on the night when Theo learns of his father’s death. Scared that his father’s floozy hook-up will
send him to foster care – Theo grabs the one thing that is important to him - The Goldfinch (as
well as the floozy’s dog) and heads back to New York – not to live with the well-heeled
family on Park Avenue, but with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright) the
business partner and housemate of a man that Theo had been standing next to
when the bomb went off. This stranger in
the museum – and his niece Pippa (Aimee Lawrence as the young Pippa and Ashleigh Cummings as
the older one) – play an overly large role in the movie. The stranger directs Theo to take the
painting of the Goldfinch and he also directs Theo to Hobie, where Theo finds
Pippa again – he had been taken with her in their two minutes together – and he
had chosen to stay back to ogle this girl with whom he seemed to make a
connection when his mother went to check out another painting – and subsequently
died in the explosion.
The Goldfinch is a highly saturated symbol in this
film. It is, as I noted previously, a trompe l’oeil painting by a young student of
Rembrandt’s who was killed when a gunpowder plant exploded, leveling a third of
Delft. The Goldfinch is one of the few
surviving paintings by this young master.
It is a painting of bird chained to a perch – yet the bird is so lifelike that it
appears ready to fly right out of the painting.
The symbolism of this painting as having survived a prior bombing, of it
representing the ways that Theo is chained to his mother – but also, as the
film unfolds, to his fate – and how we are all chained to various and sundry
entities is important – and I think I got that before. What I didn’t get is that Theo keeps
this bird under wraps – it is literally wrapped in the pages of the New York
Post – and therefore keeps, as Hobie puts it, this thing of light out of the
light. He is also keeping his grief for
his mother out of the light – and hanging onto the painting is a way of hanging
onto her – but not appreciating her. He
literally cannot see her face in his dreams – she is forever marching away from him into the
distance, marching towards her fate.
Hobie is a complicated character whose avuncular care for
Theo makes him seem quite simple. After
the harrowing experience in the desert, Hobie takes Theo into his shop and
home. Hobie is a craftsman who restores
antique furniture. He teaches Theo about
this, and Hobie takes on the role, as he matures and becomes an adult – of the
dealer – the role that Hobie’s partner, whom Theo met in the museum, played
before. Hobie creates new pieces out of
old and Theo – channeling his dead and hustling father – sells them as if they
were the old, with the prices that go with that. He is caught in the act of doing this, which
Hobie is disappointed by, but not surprised at – he has known that the success
of the store has been extraordinary- but this is exposed by someone who is
interested in the Goldfinch and someone who thinks he knows that Theo has it.
Hobie is disappointed that Theo has stolen the Goldfinch
from the world. Hobie, who embodies human
caring – in his relationship with Theo and his relationship with Pippa – talks about
how important things are. He maintains
that things live on after us – and that it is things that allow us to connect,
not just with each other, but with those who created them and have had them in
the past, and it is the things that will be handed down to those who come after us. Ironically, it is the force of the
relationship that Theo has with Hobie that allows this materialistic creed to
add to the heavy burden of guilt that Theo has been carrying to this point.
Well, Theo can’t set things right because it turns out that,
unknown to him, he doesn’t have the painting.
And here things do get a bit wacky and farfetched. Boris shows up again, now as a well-heeled
drug dealer who confesses that he stole the painting in Vegas when Theo, in a
drunk black out, confessed that he had it.
Theo never suspected it was gone because he had kept it under wraps all
this time. Boris used it only as
collateral to build his drug network, but finally it was stolen from him and is
now out of Boris’s control. Theo is
confused and leaves Boris, returning to a weird world that Theo has recreated
as a means of sustaining himself.
In the aftermath of the bombing, Theo had fallen in love with
Pippa – and Pippa was taken from him before they had a chance to consummate that
love as her Texas aunt became her guardian as next of kin. When they meet again as young adults in Hobie’s
store, she comes with a lover from England.
Theo, deeply disappointed, reconnects with the creepy family on Park
Avenue, and woos the youngest daughter, who, it turns out, is in love with the
guy that Theo is angry with for having fingered him to the principal that
brought his mother to spend time with him in the museum where the bomb went off when they had a bit of extra time on their hands on the way to be being
chewed out for a crime he didn’t commit.
Yes, that is too tightly wound to make much sense, but I think all of
these windings are important – more on that in a minute. So, primarily to get close to the creepy
mother, and now with no pretense of love from the daughter, Theo is about to
marry her.
But what about Pippa, you might ask? She shows up, after Theo is engaged, and has
dinner with him when she comes to New York without her boyfriend for a visit. Theo confesses his love for her – a love that
he has kept alive by writing to her on a regular basis. In one of the most poignant and well-handled
scenes I have seen between young lovers, Pippa acknowledges that she misses New York, that
she misses Hobie, and that she misses Theo.
But she also misses who she would have been if the bombing hadn’t robbed
her of being the musical prodigy that she was – but more importantly it robbed her of the
solid psychological base that she would have had from which to love him. And she knows that he doesn’t have such a
base from which to love her because it has been taken from him, too. She,
rightly, I think, diagnoses them, tragically, as needing to be involved with someone other than each other in order to be functional. They are thus condemned to being romantically disconnected from each other as soul mates – in so far as souls can be mated in a moment –
and the connection can be sealed – but also threatened – by the trauma they
shared.
At a Christmas party, when Theo is facing a bleak life with
no hope of righting his relationship with Hobie, who is furious with him for
robbing the world of The Goldfinch (which is now in the hands of people who
have stolen it from Boris); Pippa, who has rejected him soulfully; his fiancée,
who is heartless and as empty as everyone in her family save her mother; and
Boris, from whom he has retreated, who should show up at the party to set
things right but Boris himself. The
miscreant with the heart of gold engages Theo as his partner in arms and they
go off to set things right. Suffice it
to say that they do that, but they go through hell to get there.
So the critics don’t, I think, get that this film is a
fable. It is story, not about the world
as it appears to be but as it actually is – not according to physics and
chemistry and biology – but according to the laws of the soul. This is a movie that makes sense in the way
that all parables do – they explain the unexplainable – they make the senseless
have a place in our lives and in our hearts.
In its essence, I believe this is a film about the functioning of
terror. Of how terror works and why it
works. Some of the critics have objected
to a film about the woes of the privileged class – as if that class does not –
or should not – have woes. I think that
all of our woes are borne out of privilege – or of our sense that we deserve
privilege. Terrorism is born, I believe,
out of a wish to let those whose lives are, compared to our own, privileged –
and to let those who are using that privilege – know what it feels like to have
one’s life torn apart by a power greater than oneself. The terrorists want us to feel what they
feel. This is called, in psychoanalytic
lingo, projective identification. A
crude, primitive, and highly effective means of depositing in another person
those feelings that are most disturbing to us so that they can understand,
viscerally, what it feels like to be them.
It is essential that the people in this film – that all of us who enjoy
the privilege of living in America – know what it feels like, on
9/11, to have what is most important to us torn from us.
But the film does not stop there – thank God. As an allegory, it points us to a
solution. Or perhaps it is a comment on the solution that we have come to. In reality, we need to deal with our pain –
and to confront the consequences of our actions – to experience our guilt – as crazy
and disconnected and disjointed as it feels – and to know – despite what
everyone tells us – that it is real. Theo, the kid with no treatment and few people caring for him, gets this, even if he can't accomplish it. In fact, this is impossible for all of us when we are in the thrall of it, and we become passive - rote - and go about being seemingly good while spreading more difficulties around like daisy petals just as Theo does.
Here I am aware that I am opening a
can of worms – perhaps the can that at least some of the reviewers sensed and
so wanted to close back down. I am, at
this moment, noting that Theo feels guilty no matter what people say and that
he does not have access to his mother’s face until he does something to set
things right again – until he starts to engage in the literally bloody task
of taking on what needs to be taken on to get things aligned again. I think it is up to us to make sense of this
metaphor and how it applies to things like 9/11 and the things that we have
done as a result of that event- have we put things right? Does Theo put them right? Were we guilty of something that brought 9/11 on? These are dicey questions perhaps not best stated directly.
The solution, in the book, the film, and in life, is not clear. I think that the
conclusion of the movie has been cleaned up a lot from the conclusion of the
book. But even the clean conclusion is
plenty muddy and confused. I don’t think
that we, as terrorized and traumatized individuals, can think clearly about how
to set things right. We want to do unto
others as we have been done to (as Theo does as Hobie’s partner – and,
arguably, as does at the end of the film as Boris's partner in crime). Indeed, I find myself wondering - in one of the plotlines I did not include - whether the angry son of the creepy family killed the father and younger brother - as a kind of variant on the central theme...
We
also don’t want to do anything. We want to hang onto a picture of how things were – knowing full well that if we
were to take it out and look at it, it would look nothing like what we want to
remember it as being. So we keep it
wrapped up. We don’t expose it – and ourselves
– to the rawness of who we are and were and the rawness of the world. And yet, despite our best efforts, that
rawness keeps forcing its way in. Ultimately we are forced to act - even as we disavow it.
This is a movie that demands a lot of us. Like the book, it is long. Like the book, it requires that we engage
with it – that we make sense of it – even though it hits us over the head with
a few things that are easier to see from an objective vantage point. But both of these – the book and the movie –
will reward us if we allow them to get under our skin – if we allow ourselves to
become – as the book would have us – Theo – or if we take a look at him – as the
movie would have us do – as an object of interest – a painting if you will – a bird
on perch – there to be seen. I think a good discussion of the unclear moral underpinnings would reveal just what a wonderful parable this is. I think it, like all parables, can inform in multiple ways. It is far from the simple and dismissable movie the critics would have it be.
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