Woman in Gold ***½ (2015, Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl) – Movie Review

Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds make a good, enjoyable double act as octogenarian Jewish refugee Maria Altmann and her talented young lawyer Randy Schoenberg, who take on the Austrian government to recover the artwork she believes rightfully belongs to her.

Director Simon Curtis delivers a thoroughly engrossing, likeable, fast-moving real-life thriller dealing with some big issues. Screen-writer Alexi Kaye Campbell seems a bit scared of dealing full on with the big issues, so it might have been better cutting out all the flashbacks to World War Two Vienna, the arrival of the Nazis and the oppression of the Jews. Honestly, it’s a bit too much to cope with in a would-be popular movie drama. The legal and artwork drama is quite enough for one film.

Mirren’s good value, going through her familiar but welcome schtick, funny when she needs to be, mothering Reynolds amusingly, while effectively troubled and tormented at other times. It’s not Oscar-winning stuff but it is thoroughly entertaining. She’s stuck with a rather dodgy phony Austrian accent, but you get used to after a bit. Reynolds is good too, with plenty of puppy-dog charm, and a couple of big, effective moments of rage or tears. Daniel Brühl could have been good too, but is wasted with not enough to do as a helpful Austrian editor.

Also wasted are Katie Holmes as Reynolds’s long-suffering wife and Max Irons as Fritz in the Forties flashbacks. They are just there, though that’s okay. Charles Dance is appallingly un-American as Reynolds’s lawyer boss, though Elizabeth McGovern and Jonathan Pryce are useful in their showy little cameos as surprisingly helpful Judge Cooper and surprisingly nice Chief Justice Rehnquist.

If you don’t know the real-life story, it works nicely as a legal thriller. And if the outcome doesn’t come as a huge surprise, it is enormously cheering.

Curtis is real-life husband of Downton Abbey actress McGovern. Andrew Garfield was originally cast as Randy Schoenberg but he dropped out.

Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925) was a refined art-loving Viennese salon lady, a patron and close friend of Gustav Klimt, who painted the contentious Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I in 1907. That’s the painting Maria Altmann wants back. It was the first of two portraits Klimt painted of Bloch-Bauer, is renowned as a world masterpiece, and is referred to as the final and most fully representative work of his Klimt’s ‘golden phase’. It is now in the Neue Galerie, New York.

Adele was Maria’s beloved aunt, and to get back the portrait, Maria has to take on the authorities at the Belvedere museum in Vienna, the Austrian state-run gallery that took ownership of the picture after the Nazis looted the Bloch-Bauer’s apartment. The gallery directors are stern, unsympathetic and unbending. However, their position is dodgy. Adele in her 1925 will bequeathed the portrait to the Belvedere after the death of her husband Ferdinand, but his superseding will has left everything to Maria.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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