Boxoffice - August 2019

the Brooklyn director would helm Peter Straughan’s
(Frank, “Wolf Hall”) script of The Goldfinch, about
a boy whose mother is killed in a terrorist attack
and who subsequently gets involved in the world of
antiques forgery. A talented cast subsequently took
shape, including Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright,
Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Denis O’Hare, Finn
Wolfhard (“Stranger Things”), Aneurin Barnard
(Dunkirk), and Ansel Elgort in the lead role of
Theo Decker, with Oakes Fegley (Pete’s Dragon) as
as his younger counterpart.
Coming in at slightly under 800 pages, Tartt’s
The Goldfinch is, in Crowley’s words, something
like “Dickensian novel. … You’re moving through
a young man’s whole life.” Naturally, things would
have to be cut. The question for Crowley and
Straughan was “what kind of piece of cinema is it
going to be, as opposed to just an adaptation.”
The solution was in intercutting between two
periods of Theo’s life—one, when he’s a 14-yearold
boy who’s lost his mother and subsequently
finds himself shunted between different caretakers;
and two, when he’s “a young man at a point when
the events that have trapped him are going to rattle
apart, and he’s either going to fall apart or have to
rescue himself. That cutting back creates a more
dreamlike reality.” Whereas Tartt’s novel is told in
a linear fashion, the film version of The Goldfinch
jumps back and forth between the two time lines,
in Crowley’s words allowing “the whole thing to
take on a cinematic personality.”
In part, Crowley explains, The Goldfinch is a
film about “doubleness and pairs—everything that
happens in the first half has its equal and opposite
in the second half. Sometimes somebody is
in the same position. Sometimes they’re the exact
opposite.” The two versions of the characters inform
each other, adding depth to the overall story.
The character of Mrs. Barbour, played by Nicole
Kidman, is “probably the clearest indication” of
this, says Crowley. As the matriarch of the family
that initially takes Theo in after the death of his
mother, she is “cold and emotionally withdrawn in
the first section. Then, in the second section, you
realize that her ‘perfect family’ was actually crumbling
all along. … In the second half, when adult
Theo comes back and meets her, she’s all emotion,
because life has snapped her in two.”
As someone who’s often been labeled “cold” by
the public—and whose resurgence over the last
several years has reminded people who may have
forgotten what an exceptional actress she is—Kidman
was a casting coup for this particular character.
“The quality of work that she’s been doing over
the last four or five years is just thrilling,” Crowley
says. “I loved working with her. She’s so exciting on
set, because she’s so hungry to keep digging further
into a scene from take to take. She’s happy to be
challenged by tricky material.”
Elgort, too, “dug inside” for a role that “pushed
him well out of his comfort zone in a way that
he was happy to do,” Crowley explains. In films
like Baby Driver, The Fault in Our Stars, and the
Divergent series, Elgort has heretofore mostly exuded
some variation of a “hip teen” image—but here, it
feels like he’s blossoming into an entirely different,
more mature actor. “It’s much more emotional,
tricky material,” says Crowley. “Right from his
earlier performances—he’s a film star! He can hold
a screen. A fascinating thing about him is that he
also can be at times held in to [the point of being]
almost illegible, and then [become] quite emotional.
And that’s what you
need for adult Theo.”
Not an actor on
the film—but all the
same a person who
had an enormous
impact on it—is
legendary director of
photography Roger
Deakins, whose
extensive filmography
includes No Country
for Old Men, Skyfall, The Shawshank Redemption,
and Blade Runner 2049, the latter of which netted
him his first Best Achievement in Cinematography
Oscar after 13 nominations. About five months
after he’d been brought on board, Crowley recalls,
“obviously I asked about Roger. … I didn’t quite
believe it” when he was told Deakins was interested
in meeting.
“What can I say? He has given so much to
the film. I adored working with him from top to
bottom. He has an amazing eye and is a practical
craftsman. He works so hard. But he’s all about
character and story,” Crowley says. Crowley, Deakins,
and production designer and regular Spike
Jonze collaborator K.K. Barrett worked together to
craft the overall visual style of The Goldfinch, which
required several distinct looks, all tied to different
parts of Theo’s journey.
“You start out with a set of ideas, or an approach,
about the vividness and the distinction
The Goldfinch was made for the big
screen, which is maybe a perverse
thing to do nowadays, rather than
keeping one eye to ‘I wonder what
this would look like on an iPhone?’
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