![]() |
Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds stumble through bland Philomena rip-off Woman in Gold |
Director: Simon Curtis
Cast: Helen Mirren (Maria Altmann), Ryan Reynolds (Randy
Schoenberg), Daniel Brühl (Hubertus Czernin), Katie Holmes (Pam Schoenberg),
Tatiana Maslany (Young Maria), Max Irons (Fritz Altmann), Charles Dance
(Sherman), Elizabeth McGovern (Judge Cooper), Jonathan Pryce (Chief Justice
Renhquist), Antje Traue (Adele Bloch-Bauer), Allan Corduner (Gustav), Henry
Goodman (Ferdinand)
The Nazi regime across Europe was a criminal one in every sense
of the word. Along with the hideous acts of murder and warmongering, Woman in Gold uses its story to remind
us their leaders were also little better than common thieves.
Maria Altmann was a young Jewish woman from a wealthy
family, living in Vienna in the 1930s. She escaped from Austria to the US in
1939 with her husband, but had to leave the rest of her family behind. Their fine
possessions, including several paintings by Klimt, were stolen by the Nazis.
Decades later, Maria (Helen Mirren) recruits struggling
lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her reclaim the paintings, now
owned by the Austrian government. The government are predictably dismissive of
any claims on their heritage, and are particularly unwilling to give up Klimt’s
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (or Woman in Gold), a portrait of Altmann’s
aunt, proudly displayed as a jewel of Austrian culture. So begins a case that
will go, via the American supreme court, to the very heart of Austria’s
uncomfortable relationship with its past. In parallel, Maria remembers her
younger self (Tatiana Maslany) and her escape from Vienna.
I think it’s fair to say Maria is a role Helen Mirren could
play standing on her head. It’s a cliché – the feisty, imperious elderly woman
who cows all around her, but has a heart of (forgive me) gold. Ryan Reynolds
Schoenberg is similarly predictably: a young, naïve, slightly bumbling
do-gooder revealed to have hidden depths of strength, and ends up connecting
with his own heritage in a “very personal” journey. In fact, every character in
the “present day” plotline is a hopeless cliché. Katie Holmes has perhaps the
worst role as Schoenberg’s wife – as The Wife always does in these things, she
spends the first half of the film asking her husband to drop his time-consuming
crusade, but come the second half she’s making the inevitable “you’ve come too
far to give up now” speech.
Every bit of the modern day story is predictable, reheated
slop from other, much better movies – you literally recognise every beat of
every courtroom scene. Most conversations are essentially the actors spooling
plot at each other, explaining everything from art history to Austrian mediation
procedures. The moments where the dialogue allows the actors to focus on
character land with a hamfisted heaviness, with all the subtly of Oscar “for
your consideration” scenes.
Periodically the story abandons logical evolution altogether
and leaps from A to B without explanation: Maria will never go back to Vienna, less
than five minutes of screentime later oh no actually she will (explained by a
timely, on-the-nose flashback), no she definitely won’t go back a second time,
ta-da there she is. She wants to fight, then she wants to give up, then she
wants to fight again. Whether these events were real or not, the film makes
them feel like humdrum screenplay hokum.
You keep waiting for this to spring to life and do something
fresh, but it never does. Even its odd-couple pairing is essentially Philomena reheated – but without the wit
and warmth of that film’s script. It manages to turn what should have been an
interesting story into something drier and duller than a documentary would have
been.
The film takes wing a little more in the flashbacks to the
1930s. Again, there’s nothing new here, but the performances in are infused
with a warmth, emotion and humanity missing from the other storyline – Allan
Corduner is particularly good as Maria’s loving father. The sense of peril from
the Nazis also gives the film a clear and unequivocal antagonist: the sequence
where Maria and her husband flee Vienna is more engaging and tense than
anything else in the film.
The weight of these flashbacks, however, only serves to
contrast poorly with the strange, odd-couple comedy of the rest of the film.
It’s literally two different films sitting uncomfortably together, neither
doing either any service.
Woman in Gold is a
confused film, that drags down what could have been a fascinating story into a
safe, Sunday-afternoon film that never wants to say anything too controversial
(even its potshots at the Austrians for overlooking their Nazi past is balanced
by “good” Austrians). It reduces its characters to plot-spouting clichés,
wrapped in a dry story. Although its flashback scenes carry some emotional
heft, they can’t save the main plotline which spirals on and on, never engaging
the viewer’s interest. It’s not gold, it’s very base metal.
No comments:
Post a comment