Theo is an engaging character – for the most part well played – and his journey is both entertaining and heartbreaking. Meaning much like the painting at the centre of this tale, Theo’s story both survives, and endures. despite the fragmented film’s shortcomings.

Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.

It’s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt.

I wish all of Tartt’s tender and moving allegory—the way she pours the density of growth and regret into a solid thing that can pass hands—had space to bloom in the film. It doesn’t, and I left the film appreciative of its style and strong performances, but not emotionally altered in any lingering way.

It’s a lot of soapy melodrama and underdeveloped characters that never really go anywhere.

In the end, there’s too much good stuff missing and yet not enough to serve as a satisfying meal.

What you experience isn’t the book, exactly; it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.

Perhaps the pieces could have held together with the right leading man as glue. Elgort is, assuredly, not that.

The big problem with The Goldfinch — a lifeless film that doesn’t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat — is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.

Overstuffed, overlong and utterly uninvolving, this is a movie that feels as morbidly trapped as the poor little bird of its title. Rather than spread its wings and fly free, it stays frustratingly, eternally inert.