As announced earlier this year, a big screen adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch is on the way from Warner Bros. Pictures and RatPac Entertainment. Today, Variety brings word that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy scribe Peter Straughan has signed on provide the screenplay.
Described by the Pulitzer committee as being, “a beautifully written coming-of-age novel… that stimulates the mind and touches the heart,” The Goldfinch is Tartt’s first novel in more than a decade. Published in 2013, it is officially described as follows:
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love–and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.
Straughan’s other credits include director Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats (starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey), Lenny Abrahamson’s recent Frank (starring Michael Fassbender) and David Gordon Green’s upcoming Our Brand is Crisis (starring Anthony Mackie, Billy Bob Thornton, Sandra Bullock and Scoot McNairy).
Nina Jacobson, Brett Ratner and Brad Simpson are attached to produce The Goldfinch with Racheline Benveniste and Courtenay Valenti overseeing for Warner Bros. No director is, as of yet, attached to the adaptation, but check back for details as they become available.
