To the list of great books mangled by Hollywood – F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – add Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. This cinematic assault on Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer prize-winning novel would seem to have everything going for it: a classy cast; the acclaimed Irish film and theater director John Crowley, fresh off his Best Picture nominee Brooklyn; Oscar-nominated screenwriter Peter Straughan and peerless camera magician Roger Deakins. How could these paragons go wrong? For starters, Tartt’s nearly 800-page opus does nor squeeze easily into a conventional two-hour running time – you watch The Goldfinch thinking how much better it might have been as a long-form miniseries. As it is, Straughan appears to be adapting the Cliff’s Notes version of the book instead of the book itself, producing an unplayable series of scene snippets. The timeline is borderline random, leaving the chronology in a chaotic jumble that defies reason.