Woman in Gold - film review: Dame Helen Mirren and the case of the looted art

Mirren is mostly predictable but the film still has the power to shock, says Charlotte O'Sullivan
On a mission: Marta and Randy fight for justice

Far be it from me to dispute Helen Mirren’s status as an international treasure. I love her to bits. But she’s under-stretched in Simon Curtis’s follow-up to My Week with Marilyn, another inspired-by-real-life drama that manages to be both overly glossy and plodding.

Mirren is mostly predictable as Maria Altmann, the Los Angeles resident who, in 2006, reclaimed Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer on behalf of her Austrian-Jewish family (Adele was Maria’s beloved aunt, and the two women and the portrait all lived under the same roof).

Maria nags shy, culturally rootless lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) into helping her take on the big boys at the Belvedere in Vienna, the Austrian state-run gallery that gained ownership of the portrait after the Nazis looted the Bloch-Bauers’ flat.

Piano music jabs at our heart strings as Randy realises that Maria is adorable and discovers his roots. Meanwhile, poor Katie Holmes has a dog of a role as Reynolds’s supportive, moist-eyed wife. So why do I feel like defending Woman in Gold? Early reviews from this year’s Berlin Film Festival accused Curtis of making the gallery directors look like monsters. It’s simply not true. The directors, as seen here, are neither nice nor evil, just practical men who want to hold on to precious assets.

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Critics also claim that the film simplifies Maria’s mission. They feel it should be more problematic that she ignores her aunt’s wishes, pointing to the fact that Adele, in her 1925 bequest, said that the portrait should go to the Belvedere when her husband, Ferdinand, was dead.

Such logic not only ignores the gallery’s greed — they didn’t wait until Ferdinand was dead — but also reduces Nazi atrocities to a kind of historical footnote. We’re supposed to believe that Adele, had she lived longer, would have been happy to overlook how the painting left her home. Yikes. What planet are these reviewers on?

Nor is the film quite devoid of the power to shock. In bleached-out flashbacks, Viennese citizens are forced to write on the walls — the word they have to spell out, of course, is “Jew”. In the present day, a passer-by accosts Maria — he hisses: “Not everything is about the Holocaust!” — and Mirren’s reaction shot is priceless.

Mirren is an artist who has been exploring sad, seductive women for years. Woman in Gold offers her — and the whole cast — a limited canvas. Yet, fleetingly, the ugliness and strangeness of life peeps through.

Cert 12A, 109 mins

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