By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNowThe challenge facing Irish filmmaker John Crowley was adapting Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning, 784-page novel “The Goldfinch” about a precocious, 13-year-old boy whose adolescence is shattered by one tragic event, leading him into a life of subterfuge.

Tartt’s meticulously detailed story begins with how Theodore Decker (Oakes Fegley) happens to be in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when a bomb explodes, killing his mother. But the disappointing movie jumbles the linear dexterity.
So we don’t learn until much later why Theo was given a signet ring by a dying man and how he filches Dutch painter Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch” from the rubble.
By altering the chronology, jumping backward and forward, haphazardly hitting key plot points, screenwriter Peter Straughhan confuses anyone who hasn’t read the source material, which is basically a reflective character study.