Pipe down, critics. The Goldfinch star Ansel Elgort wants you to know that the film is good, despite negative reviews, because his mom said so.
Celebrities are notoriously thin-skinned, but this defense takes millennial hypersensitivity to the next level.
“The film does work, and people who see it enjoy it and are moved by it,” Elgort said on his Instagram story last weekend. “The most important person it moved for me was my mother, and she’s not moved by all my films. But she really liked this one, so that made me really like it, too.”
And the critics across America, hearing that Elgort’s mother approved of his performance, collectively changed their minds.
Wait, that’s not how that works.
The fact is, every movie star is going to have some duds. From Meryl Streep to Leonardo DiCaprio, plenty of famous actors have starred in films that flopped. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad actors; it means the films are not worth defending with this level of passion.
So you starred in a bad movie. Move on.
When one fan posted Elgort’s video to Twitter, many comments said something to the effect of, “The film wasn’t that good, but I liked the book!” or “The film wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t terrible!” That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the movie.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Goldfinch has earned accolades such as CNN’s “dull” and the New York Times’ “strictly for the birds.” If the movie is bad, critics should say so. That’s not rude; that’s how movie reviews work.
For his part, Elgort couldn’t even argue that the movie was good. The best he could say was that “there is a lot of good in the film, too.” Sure there is.
The 25-year-old should be used criticism by now. Columnist Ross Douthat wrote that in the 2017 film Baby Driver, Elgort “seems way too much like a soft kid with a punchable face who wouldn’t really last an hour in this world.”
That’s tough. But if Elgort has the same reaction every time his work receives criticism, it might just be true in real life.
