WOMAN OF GOLD FAR FROM PRECIOUS
Rich subject matter suffers from director’s lazy, condescending story- telling
Midway through Woman in Gold, a crusading lawyer is given the green light by his wife to pursue a difficult case abroad just as she’s about to go into labour. Considering that this Simon Curtis film is based on real events, it’s reasonable to believe this is something that actually happened.
But the thrust of the scene feels off. It’s less about a woman supporting her husband than absolving him of his selfishness. It lets the audience know it’s OK to cheer him on without second thoughts.
The phoniness of the sequence is a microcosm of this movie, which tells a real- life story, yet rings utterly false.
As the great- grandson of the celebrated Austrian modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg, 30- something lawyer Randy ( Ryan Reynolds) has an appreciation for Viennese culture, but his connection to his ancestral homeland is non- existent. He’s more concerned with fitting in at his new high- powered Los Angeles law firm, but nevertheless agrees to do some consulting on the side for an octogenarian widow named Maria Altmann ( Helen Mirren), who claims one of the gilded Klimts residing in the Belvedere Palace is a portrait of her late aunt — and that, as the last surviving member of a Jewish family that was harassed out of Austria by German military forces, she’s its rightful owner.
The government- mandated restitution of stolen artwork is a rich subject for drama, and Woman in Gold has several angles of approach. The script keeps switching between Randy and Maria’s transatlantic adventures, which include rummaging through archives and tangling with museum officials, and flashbacks to Maria’s early adulthood ( where she’s played as a blushing, subtitled bride by Tatiana Maslany).
This back- and- forth, crosscutting structure gives Curtis ( My Week With Marilyn) the ability to combine two species of prestige picture into one glossy package — a period drama that’s also a courtroom thriller. If the scenes in the present tense ( actually the late 1990s) are slightly more compelling, it’s because of the rapport between Mirren and Reynolds.
Randy is an appealing and idealistic character, but there are too many shots of him looking rumpled but resolute.
But the major problem with Woman in Gold isn’t its stars. Rather, it’s the cartoonish broadness of its screenplay, the way almost all of the film’s significant Austrian characters — except for a helpful journalist played by Daniel Bruhl — are depicted, in both time periods, as stubborn villains either unwilling or unable to acknowledge the sins of the past.
This isn’t just lazy dramaturgy: It’s an oversimplification of history, politics and culture that turns a potentially complex story about guilt, justice and the philosophy of ownership visavis art, into a crowd- pleasing underdog tale.
On top of that, the scenes depicting the plight of Austrian Jews in the early 1930s feel carefully sanitized. It seems Curtis doesn’t want to upset the genteel sensibilities of his audience, so he condescends to them, instead.