A10| Friday, September 13, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
IFC FILMS (2)
FILM REVIEW
Talent That Can’t Take Flight
Even a roster of top-notch stars can’t save the screen adaptation of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’
LIFE&ARTS
WARNER BROS. PICTURES (3)LARRY FESSENDENis a Promethean fig-
ure in the world of New York independent
cinema, specifically horror, with a generous
list of credits as a producer but an almost
penurious number as director. Among the
latter, the cult-fave “Habit” (1997) was the
first thriller to draw metaphorical links be-
tween AIDS, sex and vampires; “Wendigo”
(2001) was a tour de force of calibrated
anxiety; and “The Last Winter” (2006)
married arctic madness to environmental
exploitation. If Mr. Fessenden had a gospel
to preach it would be about the virtues of
low-budget, intellectually rigorous, topical,
mayhem-rich movies. Of which “Depraved”
is a perfect example.
Serving as writer, producer, director and
editor, Mr. Fessenden has reimagined
“Frankenstein” less as a parable of hubris
than an indictment of modern medicine,
Big Pharma and war. But hubris, too: Hav-
ing served as a doctor in an unspecified
Mideast battle zone, Henry (David Call) has
returned with a case of PTSD that mani-
fests itself in a crazed compulsion to pre-
serve life at any cost—and to re-create it if
necessary.
When a young man named Alex (Owen
Campbell) is viciously knifed on a Brooklyn
street—why and by whom are matters
we’re never quite sure about—his brain be-
comes the last piece in Henry’s puzzle:
how to make a whole man out of parts, in
this case the creature called Adam (Alex
Breaux), who awakens in Henry’s makeshift
Brooklyn laboratory looking like he’s just
been autopsied and knowing nothing about
who or where he is.
Henry is playing God, a la the original
Victor Frankenstein, but in this case the
Almighty also has a profit motive: Fi-
nanced by a college friend, Polidori (the
degree of repugnance Joshua Leonard gen-
erates in the role is a credit to his perfor-mance), Henry is defying nature, but also
testing a not-yet-FDA-approved drug that
prevents organ rejection. Adam may look
like a car wreck—Mr. Fessenden has to
throw a few bones, shall we say, to his
slasher/splatter base—but the newly made
man is also a walking, halting, almost-talk-
ing test case for the formula Polidori plans
to sell for untold millions.
Mr. Fessenden is a first-rate director of
actors—Mr. Breaux, for one, gives an un-
nervingly good performance—and a first-
rate editor: The rhythms established, from
the moment Alex leaves the Gowanus apart-
ment of his girlfriend, Lucy (Chloë Levine),
to Adam’s comic/tragic encounter in a bar
with an Iggy Pop fan (Addison Timlin), to
the climactic scenes at Polidori’s Prussian-
castle-like country house, are meant to rub
nerves raw.
There may be a few too-obvious flour-
ishes. The snatches of German Expressionist
set design are an obvious homage to the
James Whale-directed Frankenstein films of
the ’30s (and, even more so, “Son of Fran-
kenstein”); we needn’t be told outright that
“Henry” was the name given the Franken-
stein of those movies. And when Polidori
drags Adam off on a jaunt that includes both
a strip club and the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, his privileged, nihilistic spiel about
the meaning of life is almost too predictably
hateful.
The art, however, is articulate: Adam
gazes at a Jackson Pollock—“Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30)” it seems to be—and
sees in the painting the same animated, sub-
atomic images that have been recurring in
his head throughout the film. And when we
see Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Pygmalion and
Galatea”—the statue having come to life,
and embracing the artist—it puts a punctua-
tion mark on the mythos and epic that Mary
Shelley conjured up, and on which Mr. Fes-
senden puts such a delightfully gritty, some-
times gruesome spin.BYJOHNANDERSONFILM REVIEW
‘Depraved’: Playing God and Serving Mammon
I
f you’re going
to nap during
“The Gold-
finch,” which
isn’t a bad
plan, set your
alarm for the first
scene involving Ansel
Elgort and Denis
O’Hare. Mr. Elgort
plays the adult Theo-
dore Decker, who as a
young boy loses his
mother in a terrorist
bombing at the Met-
ropolitan Museum of
Art, “rescues” the
priceless painting of
the title, and grows up
to be a dealer in coun-
terfeit antiques. Mr. O’Hare, one of
New York’s acting treasures, is “a
prize Upper East Side swish named
Lucius Reeve”—as described in
Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel—to whom Theo has sold an al-
leged Thomas Affleck Chippendale-
style chest-on-chest.
It isn’t an earth-shaking scene, orone that propels the narrative in any
particularly urgent way. But as you
watch two solid actors spar across a
table at the Harvard Club, you real-
ize—if you’ve been awake—that elec-
tricity is possible. And how badly it’s
been missing from this movie.
“The Goldfinch” is directed by
John Crowley, who has made threegems—“Brooklyn,” “Boy A” and “In-
termission.” Here, he’s working
from a script by Peter Straughan
that strays wildly from the things
that prompted some very kind crit-
ics to dub Ms. Tartt’s book “Dicken-
sian”—namely, a relentlessly linear
structure, and a first-person ac-
count of an Upper East Side school-ologically rearranged in a way that
precludes any narrative momen-
tum. Or one’s arrival in an emo-
tionally satisfying place.
What’s terrific about “The Gold-
finch” is the casting. From the
time the book was published 2013,
readers were probably imagining
Nicole Kidman in the role of Sa-
mantha Barbour, the Park Avenue
art collector, socialite and mother
of four who has Theo (Oakes Feg-
ley) thrust upon her and her
household after the boy has scram-
bled out of the blasted Met and
gone home to wait for his mother,
Audrey (Hailey Wist), who never
arrives. Ms. Kidman is just as brit-
tle, and as reservedly warm, as her
character was on the page. Jeffrey
Wright, too, is perfect as James
“Hobie” Hobart, the restorer of an-
tiques with whom Theo will live
(and from whom he receives, with-
out quite absorbing, a sense of
moral rightness). Likewise, Finn
Wolfhard, the young “Stranger
Things” actor who plays Theo’s
friend Boris, the real engine of the
chaos to come involving that epon-
ymous 1654 masterpiece by Carel
Fabritius (which in reality is safe
and sound in the Mauritshuis in
The Hague).
It’s hard to say whether some
credit is actually due to Mr. Crow-
ley for some of the jarringly insin-
cere aspects/performances in the
film, though one could argue they
reflect either the geography or the
nature of the characters themselves.
“The Goldfinch,” after all, is a story,
and a movie, in love with New York:
The time Theo spends with the col-
lected Barbours (including Boyd
Gaines’s gleefully mad Chance Bar-
bour) is not long, but it’s paradisia-
cal—the fondest, sweetest memory
of his life, outside of his mother.
When his shifty, abusive, alcoholic
father, Larry (Luke Wilson), and
dad’s trashy girlfriend, Xandra
(Sarah Paulson), finally arrive to
take him off to Vegas, Theo’s fare-
well to the collected Barbours on an
Upper Manhattan street is the most
poignant moment in the film. Mr.
Crowley’s Vegas, on the other hand,
consists of a nightmarishly ugly
housing development being re-
claimed by the desert.
While there’s not exactly a lot of
plot in “The Goldfinch” there is a lot
of stuff, too much for even a 2^1 / 2 -
hour movie. (Would a Netflix/Hulu/
Amazon multichapter adaptation
have solved the compression prob-
lem? Maybe.) But so it goes with
book adaptations. If a novel sells
enough copies, it invariably be-
comes a movie, whether or not it’s
well-suited to film. And the screen-
writer is obliged to include as much
of the original content as possi-
ble—because who, after all, is being
catered to? The people who already
bought the book and read it, who
didn’t read the book but meant to,
or who bought the book and never
got through it. There are many
who’ve done that. May they have
better luck with the movie.Mr. Anderson is a Journal TV critic.
Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.boy’s tragic-cum-checkered history.
Elsewhere, Mr. Straughan re-
mains faithful to the book when he
should be committing adultery.
Chunks of original dialogue land
like bricks. While there was never a
storyline as much as a collection of
vignettes, they all seem to be here,
albeit distilled, reduced and chron-BYJOHNANDERSONAnsel Elgort and Willa Fitzgerald, above left; Finn Wolfhard and Oakes Fegley, above right; Nicole Kidman and Oakes, topAlex Breaux and Addison Timlin, above, and Mr. Breaux, below; Larry Fessenden reimagines
‘Frankenstein’ in ‘Depraved,’ the tale of a PTSD-suffering doctor driven to preserve life at any cost.