Woman in Gold

Director: Simon Curtis
Starring: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Antje Traue, Max Irons, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany and Charles Dance
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 109 mins. Reviewed in May 2015

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Rating notes: Infrequent coarse language

This British-American film is based on the true story of the late Maria Altmann, who lived in Los Angeles and fought the Government of Austria to reclaim the iconic, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1”, by Gustav Klimt. The painting is the title’s “Woman in Gold”. It is a remarkable gold-leaf portrait of a woman painted in 1907, and regarded as the “Mona Lisa” of Austria.

Maria (Helen Mirren) was a Jewish refugee in World War II, who fled fearfully from the Nazis as a young woman. The film opens with the funeral of her sister in the USA, where an ageing Maria discovers letters kept by her sister about what happened to Klimt’s famous artwork. It was stolen by the Nazis, and left behind, when Maria and her husband, Fritz (Max Irons) escaped from Vienna. The painting was of Maria’s aunt, Adele (AntjeTraue). For almost a decade, Maria fought to get recognition of the fact that the painting belonged legally to her family.

Maria hires a lawyer, Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her claim ownership of the painting. Maria’s claim was refused by Austria, and Randol retaliated by filing a subsequent claim in the US courts against the Austrian Government. The battle for ownership went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in Maria’s favour.

Randol wanted to take the fight back to Austria, and he was sacked by Maria when she objected to him wanting her to return to Austria to pursue the legal battle on home ground. The young lawyer quit his job with his legal firm against the advice of his boss (Charles Dance); and with the eventual support of his wife (Katie Holmes), he travelled to Austria to pursue the case on his own, driven by his conviction that Austria needed to realise the correct and proper meaning of “national restitution”. In the middle of the court hearing in Austria, Maria unexpectedly enters the courtroom to offer Randol the emotional support he thought he had lost.

For Maria, the fight for rightful ownership importantly meant recognition of the past injustices incurred by her family. Against their country’s previous ruling, the Austrian higher court ruled that the painting should be returned to her. Later, Maria sold the painting, but only on the condition that it went on display permanently. “Woman in Gold” now hangs in all its glory as a permanent exhibit, with Maria’s permission, in the Neue Gallery in New York City, USA.

The film moves from an historical perspective about the plight of Maria and her family, to courtroom scenes on legal ownership, and cuts frequently from one scenario to the other. The glory of the Klimt painting, scenes of the life of Adele and young Maria Altmann (Tatiana Maslany), and courtroom legal battles are interspersed with scenes of Nazi cruelty, wartime despair and Jewish persecution. The editing of the scenes used to display the stresses of both the past and the present is forceful and moving, but the number of flashbacks distracts a little from the cohesiveness of the movie as a whole.The sources of tension coming from the film’s separate parts are not the same, and the movie aims overall to manipulate human emotion, rather than thoughtful opinion, about the tragic events that took place.

Helen Mirren is wittily and eccentrically funny as Maria Altmann, and totally in control of her role. She skilfully injects comic repartee into the part of a Jewish survivor fighting for her rights against officialdom and bureaucracy, and Ryan Reynolds plays the part of her lawyer convincingly as a young, nervous person trying to do the right thing by Maria and committed emotionally to the obvious injustices she has endured. Scripting for the film is a little cliched to sustain Maria’s perception that “I don’t know if I have the strength to deal with these people”, but she also knows that ” the past is asking something of the present”, and the film’s major moral messages, such as “justice is priceless” and “your only worry is fear”, are inspiring.

This movie is a warm, good-hearted film in which gross injustices are righted, and the human spirit is shown to rise above anxiety and fear. It has compassion, and is very well acted by Mirren and Reynolds. This is a much better movie than the similarly art-conscious, “The Monuments Men” (2014), which was also about precious art being stolen on a grand scale in war-time. It descends at times into sentimentality and travels down that path simply, but with conviction.