Not to mention - OK, we will mention - the parade of tragic deaths (many of them offscreen) involving, let’s see, at least five parents and/or parental figures.Īn encounter with a dying man at the Met leads teenage Theo to the doorstep of the antiques dealer and furniture maker Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), a warm and caring man who takes Theo under his wing. And then we get a ludicrous, international crime thriller development that comes across as if all parties involved suddenly decided to film 30 pages of an “Untitled Liam Neeson Thriller” script that never got made.In present day, Theo (played by Ansel Elgort) is a handsome, well-dressed, successful antiques dealer - but he continues to self-medicate with the pills he started consuming after the tragedy he is engaged to the wrong woman, and he’s haunted by events of the past, including a dark secret he’s been harboring all these years.Barbour (Nicole Kidman), who takes a maternal liking to young Theo (though she has four children of her own), exhibits such cool reserve we half-expect to see little clouds when she exhales.

(The pompous idiot patriarch of the family hands Theo a new pair of pajamas and says perhaps Theo should have a “little nip” of alcohol.) Even Mrs. With Theo’s deadbeat dad long out of the picture, Theo (his face still smudged, his clothes marked by soot and ashes) is taken in for the time being by the wealthy, stodgy, blue-blood Barbour family, who seem spectacularly ill-equipped to help this poor child. Most of the first hour of the film follows 13-year-old Theo (Oakes Fegley), who was with his mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City when a terrorist bomb exploded, with Theo’s mom among the fatalities.

Although featuring the same core characters in narratives separated by about a decade, “The Goldfinch” feels like three distinct movies:

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