Woman In Gold (M). Director: Simon Curtis. Starring: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Homes, Tatiana Maslany. 109 minutes
Last year, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men examined a fascinating subplot of the Second World War — the efforts of a team of art scholars to retrieve and preserve works of art stolen or imperilled by the Nazis. Though well-intentioned, the film missed the mark badly, working neither as an adventure romp nor as a serious consideration of the intrinsic cultural value of art. Woman In Gold deals with related subject matter, and sadly its shortcomings are comparable.
It is based on the true story of Maria Altmann, a Jewish Austrian national who fled her home country as a young woman after its 1938 annexation by Germany. Maria, played by Mirren in the present-day (the film opens in 1998 Los Angeles) and by Maslany in flashbacks to late-1930s Vienna, has lived and worked in America ever since, and has resisted the urge to so much as visit the country and city that holds many wonderful and painful memories for her.
Now she may have reason to return. Maria's aunt was the subject of one of Austria's most famous artworks, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, by the painter Gustav Klimt, during his famed 'golden phase'. (In contrast to The Monuments Men, Woman In Gold at least attends to the endeavour of the creative process — which surely is part of art's intrinsic value — with an opening sequence portraying the artist deftly manipulating fragile gold leaf onto his stunning work-in-progress.)
The painting, along with several others by Klimt, was stolen from Maria's family by the Nazis, and now hangs in a gallery in Vienna. But questions have emerged regarding the gallery's and Austria's continued possession of these and other works of art stolen by the Nazis from private collections. So Maria enlists the help of talented but inexperienced lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Reynolds) — whose own grandfather was a famous Austrian composer — to seek restitution.
This is a fascinating story, with its fingers in several meaty thematic pies. It is concerned with the means and consequences of individuals and nations trying to fully come to terms with difficult histories. And it skirts fraught questions regarding what constitutes 'ownership' of cultural artefacts with a high level of national significance, and the ethics of the ways in which individual rights might be circumvented in the name of this perceived greater national