On September 23, 2013, Donna Tartt released her third novel, The Goldfinch. While some thought the novel was too long, its general reception was positive. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the following year and was shortlisted for many other awards. It even spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Not even a year after it was published, the film rights were acquired by Warner Bros. Pictures, but it took until 2017 for a deal to be finalized between them and Amazon Studios in order to finance and distribute the film.
In terms of its production, The Goldfinch was absolutely normal. There were no horror stories of actors being divas or writers quitting over minor disputes. I remember being excited when set photos were posted online. I hadn’t read the book, but I owned it, having shelled out eight dollars for that absolute brick at a secondhand bookstore. Still, I knew the story, and I liked it, and I figured, well, it looks pretty, so that means it’s going to be good, right?
According to an article by The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. realized the film was going to do badly following just a few test screenings. This caused a sharp decline in its marketing, and once the negative reviews started to roll in, I had to accept that this was not going to be the fantastic film I wanted it to be. Tragically, aesthetics aren’t everything. The Goldfinch was a bonafide flop, with its Rotten Tomatoes score coming in at a crisp 24% and the film only making 20% of its budget back — yikes.
The movie theatre I work at stopped showing it about two weeks into its run. I still wanted to see it, so I gathered my closest friends and somehow convinced them they wanted to see it too, and on a Monday night we made the thirty-minute drive to a theatre in Winter Park that was still showing it. Obviously, we were the only people in the theatre.
Was the movie terrible? Absolutely. The pacing was exhausting, and the editing was terrible (worse than Bohemian Rhapsody’s editing, if you can believe it), but god, the actors really gave it their all. You can say many, many things about this movie, but you cannot deny that Ansel Elgort, Aneurin Barnard and the rest of the cast did an amazing job with what they were given. And you know what? I enjoyed the movie; my friends and I had fun. Honestly, saying we just “had fun” is an understatement, because we still talk about that evening to this day.
I think that’s the beauty of bad movies — the movies themselves might be bad, but the memories you make around them are priceless. Other people may not understand the jokes my friends and I make about The Goldfinch, but we do, and that’s all that matters. Did John Crowley think, while directing this absolute train wreck, that four young adults in Orlando would revolve half of their inside jokes around it? Probably not, and I think that’s beautiful.
If you have two and a half hours to spare and want to watch a movie that feels like it’s giving you brain damage the entire time, go ahead and give The Goldfinch a watch. If you don’t have that much time to spare, clear your schedule. I promise you’re going to have a good time. Besides, The Goldfinch was quickly stripped of its “Worst Movie of 2019” status when Cats was released in December, so at least you know it could never be as bad as that.