Photo by Robert Viglasky
Woman in Gold begins with a brief scene of Gustav Klimt composing an almost-Byzantine mosaic in gold leaf and paint on canvas. The face of Adele, sitting for this portrait, registers an enigmatic note of anxiety. Can she sense that in the future jackbooted barbarians will rip her portrait from the wall of her family’s Viennese apartment?
Glimpses of the past recur in Woman in Gold, whose main story opens in 1998 when Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, spades some Los Angeles earth onto her sister’s coffin. Sorting through old correspondence after her sibling’s death, Maria (Helen Mirren) comes across a postwar paper trail regarding their aunt’s portrait, leading her to believe that Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery gained possession of the painting under dubious circumstances. Sweetening her persistence with Old World charm and some homemade strudel, Maria persuades the initially reluctant, nerdy junior attorney, Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), to help pursue her claim. Schoenberg is the grandson of the avant-garde Viennese composer who also fled the Nazis, but previously had little interest in the past or anything but his career.
Woman in Gold is drawn from a true story in the ongoing saga of what had been one of the Nazi’s less acknowledged crimes—a campaign of grand larceny to steal the treasures of Europe, including artwork, for their personal collections, for museums they intended to endow after the war and to sell for hard currency. Maria must face the ghosts of the past when she returns to Vienna for the first time since fleeing the Nazis. Brief flashbacks show the depredations of the local population as many Austrians gleefully welcomed the Nazis and joined in the savagery by forcing Jews to scrub the paving stones and endure public humiliation.
Director Simon Curtis (who helmed the mediocre My Week with Marilyn) reduces the story to the clean, simple lines of a TV drama. Surprisingly, with Mirren playing the protagonist, the expected chemistry never occurs. She is capable as the proud patrician in exile, but her co-star, Reynolds, is too dull to bring his character to life. A less workman-like screenplay and a better sense for directing actors would have elevated the film’s fascinating story into compelling cinema.
Woman in Gold
3 stars
Helen Mirren
Ryan Reynolds
Directed by Simon Curtis
Rated PG-13
