Simon Curtis (2015)

Woman in Gold is based on the true story of Maria Altmann.  Born in Vienna in 1916, Altmann came from a wealthy, cultured Jewish family and was the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the model for several paintings by Gustav Klimt, including the famous ‘Woman in Gold’ portrait.  (It’s referred to more than once in Simon Curtis’s film as ‘the Mona Lisa of Austria’.)  The painting, formally ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’, was among the thousands of art works appropriated by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s.  In 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Germany, Maria Altmann and her husband escaped from Vienna to the United States, where they settled in Los Angeles.  During the 1990s, Austria came under increasing pressure to confront the Nazi skeletons in its cupboard – pressure that was probably intensified by the revelations about the Wehrmacht past of the Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary-General.  In 1998 a change of law in Austria brought increased transparency to the process of dealing with petitions for the restitution of artworks looted during the Nazi period.  The new law enabled Hubertus Czernin, an investigative journalist, to discover, in Ministry of Culture archives, that Adele Bloch-Bauer’s husband had not donated his Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery, by which they were now supposedly owned.   Czernin’s findings sparked a campaign, conducted by Maria Altmann and her young American lawyer, Randol Schoenberg (the grandson of Arnold Schoenberg), to have five paintings, including the ‘Woman in Gold’ portrait, returned to Maria’s family.  The negotiations with the Austrian authorities and a legal case brought against the Austrian government lasted several years.  In 2004, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Austrian government was not immune from such a lawsuit; two years later, an arbitration panel of three Austrian judges ruled that Austria was legally required to return the artworks to Maria Altmann and other family heirs.  Later in 2006, ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ was sold to the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135m and has been on display ever since in the Neue Galerie in New York City, which Lauder established in 2001.

It’s hard not to be affected by the story of Woman in Gold.  The éclat of Jewish culture in European cultural centres like Vienna in the early decades of the twentieth century does more than give a particular resonance to the appropriation of the Klimt paintings:  it serves as a symbol of the larger, more appalling dispossession that the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis.  But the screenplay, by Alexi Kaye Campbell, is primitive and perfunctory.  The characters are hardly developed at all in the script – the actors are expected to do the work.  When Maria first returns to Vienna with Randol (Randy), they spend time with Hubertus Czernin – who is there simply to provide background information.  That remains his function throughout the film until, late on, Czernin reveals his feelings of shame at the discovery that his father was a Nazi.  Having got that off his chest, he smiles a couple of times.  (As Czernin is played by Daniel Brühl, the smiles make a welcome change after his recent grim turn in The Face of an Angel.)   Czernin seems to have more screen time also because the character of Randy is so underwritten.  Ryan Reynolds is likeable enough in the role but the coverage of Randy’s family life back in America is feebly simplified.  He quits his job as a lawyer to devote himself to Maria’s cause.  His wife Pam (Katie Holmes), who’s expecting their second child, is momentarily angry but almost immediately accepts that Randy has done-what-is-right.  His lineage is potentially important to the material (Arnold Schoenberg left Europe for the US shortly after Hitler came to power) but there’s hardly any sense of what this means to Randy – other than when he goes to a concert in Vienna, featuring his grandfather’s music, and the camera moves in on Randy’s face to show that he’s deeply moved.  This is a typical moment in Woman in Gold, which is full of bits the film-makers appear to recall having seeing in other movies and which they think must therefore be sort of OK.  Simon Curtis did a competent job on My Week with Marilyn but he’s directing by numbers here.

It’s hard to understand why Randy isn’t more irritated by Maria’s habitual treatment of him (she’s forever scolding him – affectionately but, I thought, condescendingly too); and why, as a lawyer, he’s not more exasperated by her tendency to make impulsive, unopposable decisions.  The offputting trailer for Woman in Gold made it only too clear what Maria would be like and the film as a whole doesn’t explore her character.  It merely multiplies the examples shown in the trailer of what a feisty, demanding, tactless but ‘colourful’ old girl she is.  In Maria’s recollections of her youth in Vienna, Helen Mirren hints at something more but Alexi Kaye Campbell has given her virtually nothing to work with.  Mirren is also fundamentally miscast.  Maria Altmann died in 2011 at the age of ninety-four; she was in her early eighties when she set out to recover the family paintings and ninety when she finally succeeded.  Helen Mirren is not quite seventy and looks younger.  In one sense, it’s a relief that she and Simon Curtis decided against a full-scale geriatric characterisation but Mirren’s walk often seems as rapid as her speech and the changes in her facial expressions.  (Judi Dench would have been better able to embody the contrast between Maria Altmann’s bossy indomitability and her physical vulnerability.)  Maria says wryly to an Austrian government adversary, ‘You’re hoping I’ll die before the lawsuit is settled – but I feel I could live another forty years!’  The remark has no impact because Helen Mirren looks as if she could do just that.   Her natural authority means that her Maria is in charge in the wrong way – she’s overbearing.

The best performance in Woman in Gold comes from Tatiana Maslany, the Canadian actress who plays Maria as a young woman.   Appealing and emotionally fluid, Maslany made me want to know more than the film is going to tell us about what happened to Maria in America in the years after her arrival there with her husband Fritz (nicely played by Max Irons) – how she turned into the Mirren Maria.  The flight from Vienna, although it’s essentially conventional, is shot (by Ross Emery), edited (by Peter Lambert) and played in ways that bring out the speed and danger of the couple’s escape to exciting and upsetting effect.  The flashbacks to pre-Nazi Vienna aren’t imaginative but I liked a sequence, at Maria’s and Fritz’s wedding, when they and their families dance and the camera spins with them.  The music credit goes to two composers, Martin Phipps and Hans Zimmer, and I expect Zimmer was responsible for the grandiose rather than the sentimental-reminiscent sections.  There are effective cameos, as judges at different stages of the legal process, from Jonathan Pryce (whose Cardinal Wolsey was the best thing in the BBC’s recent, hugely overrated Wolf Hall) and Elizabeth McGovern; but the most striking person in a small part is called Susi Spitz[1].  She plays an elderly witness, with Maria and others, at a public hearing about the restitution of art works stolen by the Nazis.  In the few seconds she’s on screen, Spitz gives the woman she’s playing a documentary reality and power.  The undeniably interesting subject of Woman in Gold and the poor film that’s resulted make you wonder:  why, if film-makers are going to be as dramatically unimaginative as this, don’t they just make a documentary?  It’s a rhetorical question, of course:  Woman in Gold cost $11m; less than a month after its release, the box-office receipts are $17.7m.

12 April 2015

[1] I think … I’ve arrived at the name by process of elimination from the IMDB cast list.